Abstract
Linguistic typology provides features that have a potential of uncovering deep phylogenetic relations among the world’s languages. One of the key challenges in using typological features for phylogenetic inference is that horizontal (spatial) transmission obscures vertical (phylogenetic) signals. In this paper, we characterize typological features with respect to the relative strength of vertical and horizontal transmission. To do this, we first construct (1) a spatial neighbor graph of languages and (2) a phylogenetic neighbor graph by collapsing known language families. We then develop an autologistic model that predicts a feature’s distribution from these two graphs. In the experiments, we managed to separate vertically and/or horizontally stable features from unstable ones, and the results are largely consistent with previous findings.- Anthology ID:
- C16-1080
- Volume:
- Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers
- Month:
- December
- Year:
- 2016
- Address:
- Osaka, Japan
- Editors:
- Yuji Matsumoto, Rashmi Prasad
- Venue:
- COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
- Note:
- Pages:
- 836–846
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/C16-1080
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Kenji Yamauchi and Yugo Murawaki. 2016. Contrasting Vertical and Horizontal Transmission of Typological Features. In Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers, pages 836–846, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
- Cite (Informal):
- Contrasting Vertical and Horizontal Transmission of Typological Features (Yamauchi & Murawaki, COLING 2016)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/bionlp-24-ingestion/C16-1080.pdf