Related papers: Beyond cognacy
We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art algorithms for automatic cognate detection by comparing how useful automatically inferred cognates are for the task of phylogenetic inference compared to classical manually annotated cognate…
Phylogenetic methods have broad potential in linguistics beyond tree inference. Here, we show how a phylogenetic approach opens the possibility of gaining historical insights from entirely new kinds of linguistic data--in this instance,…
Automatic phylogenetic inference plays an increasingly important role in computational historical linguistics. Most pertinent work is currently based on expert cognate judgments. This limits the scope of this approach to a small number of…
Identification of cognates across related languages is one of the primary problems in historical linguistics. Automated cognate identification is helpful for several downstream tasks including identifying sound correspondences,…
To fully exploit the potential of computational phylogenetic methods for cognate data one needs to leverage specific (complex) models an machine learning-based techniques. However, both approaches require datasets that are substantially…
More and more languages in the world are under study nowadays, as a result, the traditional way of historical linguistics study is facing some challenges. For example, the linguistic comparative research among languages needs manual…
Phonological reconstruction is one of the central problems in historical linguistics where a proto-word of an ancestral language is determined from the observed cognate words of daughter languages. Computational approaches to historical…
In historical linguistics, the affiliation of languages to a common language family is traditionally carried out using a complex workflow that relies on manually comparing individual languages. Large-scale standardized collections of…
Phylogenetic networks extend phylogenetic trees to allow for modeling reticulate evolutionary processes such as hybridization. They take the shape of a rooted, directed, acyclic graph, and when parameterized with evolutionary parameters,…
The Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) is a computational abstraction that represents a partial summary either of indel history, or of structural similarity. Taking the former view (indel history), it is possible to use formal automata…
In this paper, we describe the problem of cognate identification and its relation to phylogenetic inference. We introduce subsequence based features for discriminating cognates from non-cognates. We show that subsequence based features…
In this article we propose a novel method to estimate the frequency distribution of linguistic variables while controlling for statistical non-independence due to shared ancestry. Unlike previous approaches, our technique uses all available…
In traditional studies on language evolution, scholars often emphasize the importance of sound laws and sound correspondences for phylogenetic inference of language family trees. However, to date, computational approaches have typically not…
Working with cognate data involves handling synonyms, that is, multiple words that describe the same concept in a language. In the early days of language phylogenetics it was recommended to select one synonym only. However, as we show here,…
Computational approaches to historical linguistics have been proposed since half a century. Within the last decade, this line of research has received a major boost, owing both to the transfer of ideas and software from computational…
Gene set analysis (GSA) is a foundational approach for interpreting genomic data of diseases by linking genes to biological processes. However, conventional GSA methods overlook clinical context of the analyses, often generating long lists…
Probabilistic models over strings have played a key role in developing methods allowing indels to be treated as phylogenetically informative events. There is an extensive literature on using automata and transducers on phylogenies to do…
Sound correspondence patterns form the basis of cognate detection and phonological reconstruction in historical language comparison. Methods for the automatic inference of correspondence patterns from phonetically aligned cognate sets have…
Historical linguistics aims at inferring the most likely language phylogenetic tree starting from information concerning the evolutionary relatedness of languages. The available information are typically lists of homologous (lexical,…
Phylogenetic trees elucidate evolutionary relationships among species, but phylogenetic inference remains challenging due to the complexity of combining continuous (branch lengths) and discrete parameters (tree topology). Traditional Markov…