7 papers
How communicatively optimal are exact numeral systems? Once more on lexicon size and morphosyntactic complexity
Chundra Cathcart, Arne Rubehn, Katja Bocklage +7
Recent research argues that exact recursive numeral systems optimize communicative efficiency by balancing a tradeoff between the size of the numeral lexicon and the average morpho…
Using Correspondence Patterns to Identify Irregular Words in Cognate sets Through Leave-One-Out Validation
Frederic Blum, Johann-Mattis List
Regular sound correspondences constitute the principal evidence in historical language comparison. Despite the heuristic focus on regularity, it is often more an intuitive judgemen…
Everybody Likes to Sleep: A Computer-Assisted Comparison of Object Naming Data from 30 Languages
AlžbÄta KuÄerová, Johann-Mattis List
Object naming - the act of identifying an object with a word or a phrase - is a fundamental skill in interpersonal communication, relevant to many disciplines, such as psycholingui…
Annotating and Inferring Compositional Structures in Numeral Systems Across Languages
Arne Rubehn, Christoph Rzymski, Luca Ciucci +6
Numeral systems across the world's languages vary in fascinating ways, both regarding their synchronic structure and the diachronic processes that determined how they evolved in th…
Unstable Grounds for Beautiful Trees? Testing the Robustness of Concept Translations in the Compilation of Multilingual Wordlists
David Snee, Luca Ciucci, Arne Rubehn +2
Multilingual wordlists play a crucial role in comparative linguistics. While many studies have been carried out to test the power of computational methods for language subgrouping…
From Isolates to Families: Using Neural Networks for Automated Language Affiliation
Frederic Blum, Steffen Herbold, Johann-Mattis List
In historical linguistics, the affiliation of languages to a common language family is traditionally carried out using a complex workflow that relies on manually comparing individu…