Affiliation:
1. Institute of Linguistics, University of Tübingen , Wilhelmstraße 19, 72074 Tübingen , Germany
Abstract
Abstract
Computational approaches to historical linguistics have been proposed for 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 biology and to the release of several large electronic data resources suitable for systematic comparative work. In this article, some of the central research topics of this new wave of computational historical linguistics are introduced and discussed. These are automatic assessment of genetic relatedness, automatic cognate detection, phylogenetic inference and ancestral state reconstruction. They will be demonstrated by means of a case study of automatically reconstructing a Proto-Romance word list from lexical data of 50 modern Romance languages and dialects. The results illustrate both the strengths and the weaknesses of the current state of the art of automating the comparative method.
Subject
Linguistics and Language,Language and Linguistics
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