Publications - Published papers
Please find below publications of our group. Currently, we list 565 papers. Some of the publications are in collaboration with the group of Sonja Prohaska and are also listed in the publication list for her individual group. Access to published papers (
) is restricted to our local network and chosen collaborators.
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) is restricted to our local network and chosen collaborators.
If you have problems accessing electronic information, please let us know:©NOTICE: All papers are copyrighted by the authors; If you would like to use all or a portion of any paper, please contact the author.
A Pipeline for Computational Historical Linguistics
Lydia Steiner, Peter F. Stadler, Michael Cysouw
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Status: Published
Language Dynamics and Change
Abstract
There are many parallels between historical linguistics and molecular phylogenetics. In this paper we describe an algorithmic pipeline that mimics, as closely as possible, the traditional workflow of language reconstruction known as the <i>comparative method</i>. The pipeline consists of suitably modified algorithms based on recent research in bioinformatics, that are adapted to the specifics of linguistic data. This approach can alleviate much of the laborious research needed to establish proof of historical relationships between languages. Equally important to our proposal is that each step in the workflow of the comparative method is implemented independently, so language specialists have the possibility to scrutinize intermediate results. We have used our pipeline to investigate two groups of languages, the Tsezic languages from the Caucasus and the Mataco-Guaicuruan languages from South America, based on the lexical data from the <i>Intercontinental Dictionary Series (IDS)</i>. The results of these tests show that the current approach is a viable and useful extension to historical linguistic research.
Keywords
language phylogeny, word alignments, Tsezic, Mataco-Guaicuruan