Are Sounds Sound for Phylogenetic Reconstruction?
Luise Häuser, Gerhard Jäger, Johann-Mattis List, Taraka Rama, Alexandros Stamatakis
Abstract
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 taken this potential into account. Most computational studies still rely on lexical cognates as major data source for phylogenetic reconstruction in linguistics, although there do exist a few studies in which authors praise the benefits of comparing words at the level of sound sequences. Building on (a) ten diverse datasets from different language families, and (b) state-of-the-art methods for automated cognate and sound correspondence detection, we test, for the first time, the performance of sound-based versus cognate-based approaches to phylogenetic reconstruction. Our results show that phylogenies reconstructed from lexical cognates are topologically closer, by approximately one third with respect to the generalized quartet distance on average, to the gold standard phylogenies than phylogenies reconstructed from sound correspondences.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.sigtyp-1.11
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP
- Month:
- March
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- St. Julian's, Malta
- Editors:
- Michael Hahn, Alexey Sorokin, Ritesh Kumar, Andreas Shcherbakov, Yulia Otmakhova, Jinrui Yang, Oleg Serikov, Priya Rani, Edoardo M. Ponti, Saliha Muradoğlu, Rena Gao, Ryan Cotterell, Ekaterina Vylomova
- Venues:
- SIGTYP | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 78–87
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigtyp-1.11
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Luise Häuser, Gerhard Jäger, Johann-Mattis List, Taraka Rama, and Alexandros Stamatakis. 2024. Are Sounds Sound for Phylogenetic Reconstruction?. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP, pages 78–87, St. Julian's, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Are Sounds Sound for Phylogenetic Reconstruction? (Häuser et al., SIGTYP-WS 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/emnlp-22-attachments/2024.sigtyp-1.11.pdf