The reconstruction engine: a computer implementation of the comparative method
Computational Linguistics - Special issue on computational phonology
An algorithm to align words for historical comparison
Computational Linguistics
Alignment of multiple languages for historical comparison
COLING '98 Proceedings of the 17th international conference on Computational linguistics - Volume 1
Bayesian identification of cognates and correspondences
SigMorPhon '07 Proceedings of Ninth Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Morphology and Phonology
| Hi-index | 48.22 |
A practical PL/1 program is described which can assist comparative linguists to determine the regular sound correspondences between genetically related languages. The investigator must arrange data for input by aligning pairs of suspected cognates. The program tabulates the correspondences, and uses list processing techniques to sort and count them. Each pair of words is then assigned a relative value that is a function of the total frequency in the data of each correspondence found in that pair of words. The output is a list of all correspondence types with their frequency of occurrence in the data, and a separate listing of each correspondence with all wordpairs showing that correspondence (unless their relative value is below an arbitrarily chosen cutoff point). The article explains the usefulness, as well as the limitations, of the program, and illustrates its use with a small portion of hypothetical data.