This paper describes a workflow to impute missing values in a typological database, a sub- set of the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS). Using a world-wide phylogeny de- rived from lexical data, the model assumes a phylogenetic continuous time Markov chain governing the evolution of typological val- ues. Data imputation is performed via a Max- imum Likelihood estimation on the basis of this model. As back-off model for languages whose phylogenetic position is unknown, a k- nearest neighbor classification based on geo- graphic distance is performed.

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.

Most current approaches in phylogenetic linguistics require as input multilingual word lists partitioned into sets of etymologically related words (cognates). Cognate identification is so far done manually by experts, which is time consuming and as of yet only available for a small number of well-studied language families. Automatizing this step will greatly expand the empirical scope of phylogenetic methods in linguistics, as raw wordlists (in phonetic transcription) are much easier to obtain than wordlists in which cognate words have been fully identified and annotated, even for under-studied languages. A couple of different methods have been proposed in the past, but they are either disappointing regarding their performance or not applicable to larger datasets. Here we present a new approach that uses support vector machines to unify different state-of-the-art methods for phonetic alignment and cognate detection within a single framework. Training and evaluating these method on a typologically broad collection of gold-standard data shows it to be superior to the existing state of the art.