Related papers: Glottochronology and problems of protolanguage rec…

A glottochronologic retrognostic of language system is proposed

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,…

Languages evolve over time in a process in which reproduction, mutation and extinction are all possible, similar to what happens to living organisms. Using this similarity it is possible, in principle, to build family trees which show the…

Protolanguage reconstruction is central to historical linguistics. The comparative method, one of the most influential theoretical and methodological frameworks in the history of the language sciences, allows linguists to infer protoforms…

We present a method for constructing taxonomic trees (e.g., WordNet) using pretrained language models. Our approach is composed of two modules, one that predicts parenthood relations and another that reconciles those predictions into trees.…

We consider a pruning of the inhomogeneous continuum random trees, as well as the cut trees that encode the genealogies of the fragmentations that come with the pruning. We propose a new approach to the reconstruction problem, which has…

Historical linguists have identified regularities in the process of historic sound change. The comparative method utilizes those regularities to reconstruct proto-words based on observed forms in daughter languages. Can this process be…

Computational approaches in historical linguistics have been increasingly applied during the past decade and many new methods that implement parts of the traditional comparative method have been proposed. Despite these increased efforts,…

In this paper we identify several serious problems that arise in the use of syntactic data from the SSWL database for the purpose of computational phylogenetic reconstruction. We show that the most naive approach fails to produce reliable…

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…

Phylogenetic reconstruction aims at finding plausible hypotheses of the evolutionary history of genes or species based on genomic sequence information. The distinction of orthologous genes (genes that having a common ancestry and diverged…

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…

We consider the problem of estimating the evolutionary history of a set of species (phylogeny or species tree) from several genes. It is known that the evolutionary history of individual genes (gene trees) might be topologically distinct…

Lecture notes on tree language theory, in particular recognizable tree languages and finite state tree transformations.

We apply decision tree induction to the problem of discourse clue word sense disambiguation with a genetic algorithm. The automatic partitioning of the training set which is intrinsic to decision tree induction gives rise to linguistically…

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…

Generative models reliant on sequential autoregression have been at the forefront of language generation for an extensive period, particularly following the introduction of widely acclaimed transformers. Despite its excellent performance,…

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…

The supertree problem asking for a tree displaying a set of consistent input trees has been largely considered for the reconstruction of species trees. Here, we rather explore this framework for the sake of reconstructing a gene tree from a…

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…