Sequence comparison in computational historical linguistics

List, Johann‐Mattis; Walworth, Mary; Greenhill, Simon J.; Tresoldi, Tiago; Forkel, Robert

doi:10.1093/jole/lzy006

Cited by 47 publications

(90 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…Defining which words in multilingual word lists are cognate is still a notoriously difficult task for machines (List, 2014). Given that the majority of datasets are based on manually edited cognate judgments, it is important to have tools which facilitate this task while at the same time controlling for typical errors.…”

Section: Cognate Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Since historical-comparative linguistics is essentially based on sequence comparison (List, 2014), alignment analyses, in which words are arranged in a matrix in such a way that corresponding sounds are placed in the same column, are underlying all cognate sets. Unfortunately they are rarely made explicit in classical etymological dictionaries.…”

Section: Phonetic Alignmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Phylogenetic methods from biology are now regularly used to create evolutionary trees of language families (Gray and Atkinson, 2003). Methods for the comparison of biological sequences have been adapted and allow to automatically search for cognate words in multilingual word lists (List, 2014) and to automatically align them (List, 2014). Complex workflows are used to search for deep genealogical signals between established language families (Jäger, 2015).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Web-Based Interactive Tool for Creating, Inspecting, Editing, and Publishing Etymological Datasets

List¹

2017

Proceedings of the Software Demonstrations of the 15th Conference Of the European Chapter of the Association for Comp

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The paper presents the Etymological DICtionary ediTOR (EDICTOR), a free, interactive, web-based tool designed to aid historical linguists in creating, editing, analysing, and publishing etymological datasets. The EDICTOR offers interactive solutions for important tasks in historical linguistics, including facilitated input and segmentation of phonetic transcriptions, quantitative and qualitative analyses of phonetic and morphological data, enhanced interfaces for cognate class assignment and multiple word alignment, and automated evaluation of regular sound correspondences. As a web-based tool written in JavaScript, the EDICTOR can be used in standard web browsers across all major platforms.

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Section: Cognate Assessmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Phonetic Alignmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A Web-Based Interactive Tool for Creating, Inspecting, Editing, and Publishing Etymological Datasets

List¹

2017

Proceedings of the Software Demonstrations of the 15th Conference Of the European Chapter of the Association for Comp

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“…Based on a scoring function which defines transition scores between the sound classes, phonetic sequences are aligned and similarity and distance scores can be determined. The LexStat approach List (2012aList ( , 2014b) also uses sound classes, but instead of using a pre-defined scoring function, transition scores between sound classes are determined with help of a permutation test. In this test, words drawn from a randomized sample are repeatedly aligned with each other in order to create a distribution of sound transitions for unrelated languages.…”

Section: Sequence Similaritymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…With SCA and LexStat, two classical methods for cognate detection were tested List (2014b), and their underlying models for phonetic similarity (see Sec. 3.1) were used as basis for the partial cognate detection algorithm.…”

Section: Analyses and Evaluationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using Sequence Similarity Networks to Identify Partial Cognates in Multilingual Wordlists

List

Lopez

Bapteste

2016

Proceedings of the 54th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)

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Increasing amounts of digital data in historical linguistics necessitate the development of automatic methods for the detection of cognate words across languages. Recently developed methods work well on language families with moderate time depths, but they are not capable of identifying cognate morphemes in words which are only partially related. Partial cognacy, however, is a frequently recurring phenomenon, especially in language families with productive derivational morphology. This paper presents a pilot approach for partial cognate detection in which networks are used to represent similarities between word parts and cognate morphemes are identified with help of state-of-theart algorithms for network partitioning. The approach is tested on a newly created benchmark dataset with data from three sub-branches of Sino-Tibetan and yields very promising results, outperforming all algorithms which are not sensible to partial cognacy.

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Measuring diachronic language distance using perplexity: Application to English, Portuguese, and Spanish

Campos¹,

Gamallo

Alegria

2019

Nat. Lang. Eng.

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The objective of this work is to set a corpus-driven methodology to quantify automatically diachronic language distance between chronological periods of several languages. We apply a perplexity-based measure to written text representing different historical periods of three languages: European English, European Portuguese, and European Spanish. For this purpose, we have built historical corpora for each period, which have been compiled from different open corpus sources containing texts as close as possible to its original spelling. The results of our experiments show that a diachronic language distance based on perplexity detects the linguistic evolution that had already been explained by the historians of the three languages. It is remarkable to underline that it is an unsupervised multilingual method which only needs a raw corpora organized by periods.

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Sequence comparison in computational historical linguistics

Cited by 47 publications

References 33 publications

A Web-Based Interactive Tool for Creating, Inspecting, Editing, and Publishing Etymological Datasets

A Web-Based Interactive Tool for Creating, Inspecting, Editing, and Publishing Etymological Datasets

Using Sequence Similarity Networks to Identify Partial Cognates in Multilingual Wordlists

Measuring diachronic language distance using perplexity: Application to English, Portuguese, and Spanish

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