The comparison of sound sequences (words, morphemes) constitutes the core of many
techniques and methods in historical linguistics. With the help of these techniques …

Computational approaches to historical linguistics have been proposed for half a century.
Within the last decade, this line of research has received a major boost, owing both to the …

Word lists have become available for most of the world's languages, but only a small fraction
of such lists contain cognate information. We present a machine-learning approach that …

In this paper we propose a novel neural approach for automatic decipherment of lost
languages. To compensate for the lack of strong supervision signal, our model design is …

The observed pronunciations or spellings of words are often explained as arising from the
“underlying forms” of their morphemes. These forms are latent strings that linguists try to …

Abstract Words undergo various changes when entering new languages. Based on the
assumption that these linguistic changes follow certain rules, we propose a method for …

Cognates are words in related languages that have originated from the same word in an
ancestor language, such as the English/German word pair father/Vater. Cognate information …

Cognate prediction is the task of generating, in a given language, the likely cognates of
words in a related language, where cognates are words in related languages that have …

We introduce a new measure of distance between languages based on word embedding,
called word embedding language divergence (WELD). WELD is defined as divergence …

In historical linguistics, cognates are words that descend in direct line from a common
ancestor, called their proto-form, and therefore are representative of their respective …