Are Automatic Methods for Cognate Detection Good Enough for Phylogenetic Reconstruction in Historical Linguistics?

Taraka Rama, Johann-Mattis List, Johannes Wahle, Gerhard Jäger


Abstract
We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art algorithms for automatic cognate detection by comparing how useful automatically inferred cognates are for the task of phylogenetic inference compared to classical manually annotated cognate sets. Our findings suggest that phylogenies inferred from automated cognate sets come close to phylogenies inferred from expert-annotated ones, although on average, the latter are still superior. We conclude that future work on phylogenetic reconstruction can profit much from automatic cognate detection. Especially where scholars are merely interested in exploring the bigger picture of a language family’s phylogeny, algorithms for automatic cognate detection are a useful complement for current research on language phylogenies.
Anthology ID:
N18-2063
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Editors:
Marilyn Walker, Heng Ji, Amanda Stent
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
393–400
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-2063
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-2063
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Taraka Rama, Johann-Mattis List, Johannes Wahle, and Gerhard Jäger. 2018. Are Automatic Methods for Cognate Detection Good Enough for Phylogenetic Reconstruction in Historical Linguistics?. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 2 (Short Papers), pages 393–400, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Are Automatic Methods for Cognate Detection Good Enough for Phylogenetic Reconstruction in Historical Linguistics? (Rama et al., NAACL 2018)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/N18-2063.pdf
Dataset:
 N18-2063.Datasets.zip
Software:
 N18-2063.Software.zip