@inproceedings{pichel-campos-etal-2018-measuring,
    title = "Measuring language distance among historical varieties using perplexity. Application to {E}uropean {P}ortuguese.",
    author = "Pichel Campos, Jose Ramom  and
      Gamallo, Pablo  and
      Alegria, I{\~n}aki",
    editor = {Zampieri, Marcos  and
      Nakov, Preslav  and
      Ljube{\v{s}}i{\'c}, Nikola  and
      Tiedemann, J{\"o}rg  and
      Malmasi, Shervin  and
      Ali, Ahmed},
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fifth Workshop on {NLP} for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects ({V}ar{D}ial 2018)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2018",
    address = "Santa Fe, New Mexico, USA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/iwcs-25-ingestion/W18-3916/",
    pages = "145--155",
    abstract = "The objective of this work is to quantify, with a simple and robust measure, the distance between historical varieties of a language. The measure will be inferred from text corpora corresponding to historical periods. Different approaches have been proposed for similar aims: Language Identification, Phylogenetics, Historical Linguistics or Dialectology. In our approach, we used a perplexity-based measure to calculate language distance between all the historical periods of a specific language: European Portuguese. Perplexity has also proven to be a robust metric to calculate distance between languages. However, this measure has not been tested yet to identify diachronic periods within the historical evolution of a specific language. For this purpose, a historical Portuguese corpus has been constructed from different open sources containing texts with close original spelling. The results of our experiments show that Portuguese keeps an important degree of homogeneity over time. We anticipate this metric to be a starting point to be applied to other languages."
}