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Johann-Mattis List

Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
04103 Leipzig

phone: +49 341 3550 283
e-mail: mattis_list@[>>> Please remove the text! <<<]eva.mpg.de

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About me
Curriculum Vitae
Publications

About me

I am a full professor at the University of Passau, leading the Chair of Multilingual Computational Linguistics. Until March 2024, I also lead an independent research group at the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig. The research carried out in our CALC/MCL Lab at Passau and our research group in Leipzig takes inspiration from bioinformatics and computer science to tackle problems in comparative linguistics and to provide solutions for multilingual problems in computational linguistics. In my research, I generally follow a data-driven, empirical, and quantitative perspective on language change and language history. In contrast to pure computational approaches, however, I try to keep my research closely connected to traditional historical linguistics and theory, following a computer-assisted rather than a computer-based framework of quantitative research in historical linguistics.

Curriculum Vitae

since 01/2023Full professor at the University of Passau, leading the Chair of Multilingual Computational Linguistics
since 03/2021Senior scientist in the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
01/2017-02/2021Senior scientist in the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
1/2015-12/2016DFG research fellow at the Centre de Recherches Linguistique sur l'Asie Orientale (EHESS) and Université Pierre et Marie Curie (Team "Adaptation, Integration, Reticulation, Evolution")
10/2012-12/2014Post-doctoral researcher at Philipps-University Marburg
02/2009-09/2012Doctoral student at Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf (Historical Linguistics)
25.06.2008Magister Artium: Major Subject: Comparative-Historical Linguistics (Freie University Berlin), Minor Subjects: Sinology (Freie University Berlin), Russian Philology (Humboldt-University Berlin)
09/2007-01/2008Visiting student at Fúdàn University Shànghǎi (Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, taught in Chinese)
09/2005-07/2006Language student at Fudan University Shanghai
2003-2008Studies at Freie University Berlin and Humbold-University Berlin (Major Subject: Comparative-Historical Linguistics, Minor Subjects: Sinology, Russian Philology)
10/2002-09/2003Studies at Eberhard-Karls-University Tübingen (Major Subject: Rhetorics, Minor Subjects: Modern History, Comparative Literature Studies, Russian Philology)

My full and always up-to-date CV is available for download here.

Publications

List, J.-M., Forkel, R., Greenhill, S. J., Rzymski, C., Englisch, J., & Gray, R. D. (2022). Lexibank, a public repository of standardized wordlists with computed phonological and lexical features. Scientific Data, 9: 316.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Bodt, T. A., & List, J.-M. (2022). Reflex prediction: A case study of Western Kho-Bwa. Diachronica.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Power, J. M., Grimm, G. W., & List, J.-M. (2020). Evolutionary dynamics in the dispersal of sign languages. Royal Society Open Science, 7(1).
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Jackson, J. C., Watts, J., Henry, T. R., List, J.-M., Forkel, R., Mucha, P. J., Greenhill, S. J., Gray, R. D., & Lindquist, K. A. (2019). Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure. Science, 366, 1517-1522.
DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Jacques, G., & List, J. M. (2019). Save the trees why we need tree models in linguistic reconstruction (and when we should apply them). Journal of Historical Linguistics, 9(1), 128-166.
DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Sagart, L., Jacques, G., Lai, Y., Ryder, R. J., Thouzeau, V., Greenhill, S. J., & List, J.-M. (2019). Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116(21), 10317-10322.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

List, J.-M. (2019). Automatic inference of sound correspondence patterns across multiple languages. Computational Linguistics, 45(1), 137-161.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

2024

Blum, F., Barrientos, C., Zariquiey, R., & List, J.-M. (2024). A comparative wordlist for investigating distant relations among languages in Lowland South America. Scientific Data, 11(1): 92.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

2023

List, J.-M., Hill, N., Forkel, R., & Blum, F. (2023). Representing and computing uncertainty in phonological reconstruction. In N. Tahmasebi, S. Montariol, H. Dubossarsky, A. Kutuzov, S. Hengchen, D. Alfter, F. Periti, & P. Cassotti (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change (pp. 22-32). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Open Access    BibTeX   Endnote   

Wu, M.-S., & List, J.-M. (2023). Annotating cognates in phylogenetic studies of Southeast Asian languages. Language Dynamics and Change, 13(2), 161-197.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

List, J.-M. (2023). Evolutionary aspects of language change. In A. du Crest (Ed.), Evolutionary thinking across disciplines: Problems and perspectives in generalized Darwinism (pp. 103-124). Springer.
DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

List, J.-M. (2023). Inference of partial colexifications from multilingual wordlists. Frontiers in Psychology, 14: 1156540.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Tjuka, A., Forkel, R., & List, J.-M. (2023). Curating and extending data for language comparison in Concepticon and NoRaRe. Open Research Europe, 2: 141.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Steuer, J., List, J.-M., Abdullah, B. M., & Klakow, D. (2023). Information-theoretic characterization of vowel harmony: A cross-linguistic study on word lists. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP (pp. 96-109). Dubrovnik, Croatia: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Open Access    BibTeX   Endnote   

Zariquiey, R., Vera, J., Greenhill, S. J., Valenzuela, P., Gray, R. D., & List, J.-M. (2023). Untangling the evolution of body-part terminology in Pano: conservative versus innovative traits in body-part lexicalization. Interface Focus, 13(1): 20220053.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Blum, F., & List, J.-M. (2023). Trimming phonetic alignments improves the inference of sound correspondence patterns from multilingual wordlists. In L. Beinborn, K. Goswami, S. Muradoğlu, A. Sorokin, R. Kumar, A. Scherbakov, E. M. Ponti, R. Cotterell, & E. Vylomova (Eds.), The 5th workshop on research in computational linguistic typology and multilingual NLP: proceedings of the workshop (pp. 52-64). Stroudsburg: Association for Computational Linguistics.
Open Access    BibTeX   Endnote   

Greenhill, S. J., Haynie, H. J., Ross, R. M., Chira, A.-M., List, J.-M., Campbell, L., Botero, C. A., & Gray, R. D. (2023). A recent northern origin for the Uto-Aztecan family. Language, 99(1), 81-107.
Open Access    BibTeX   Endnote   

Lai, Y., & List, J.-M. (2023). Lexical data for the historical comparison of Rgyalrongic languages. Open Research Europe, 3: 99.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Miller, J. E., & List, J.-M. (2023). Detecting lexical borrowings from dominant languages in multilingual wordlists. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Short Papers (pp. 2591-2597). Association of Computational Linguistics.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

2022

Brid, N., Messineo, C., & List, J.-M. (2022). A comparative wordlist for the languages of The Gran Chaco, South America [version 2; peer review: 2 approved]. Open Research Europe, 2(90).
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Hantgan, A., & List, J.-M. (2022). Bangime: secret language, language isolate, or language island? A computer‐assisted case study. Papers in Historical Phonology, 7, 1-43.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Brid, N., List, J.-M., & Messineo, C. (2022). Patrones léxicos compartidos en el dominio etnobiológico de las lenguas del Chaco: Análisis preliminar de patrones léxicos compartidos en el dominio etnobiológico. [The languages of the Gran Chaco from the perspective of lexical semantics: Preliminary analysis of shared lexical structures in the ethnobotanical domain]. LIAMES: Línguas Indígenas Americanas, 22: e022005.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

List, J.-M., Forkel, R., Greenhill, S. J., Rzymski, C., Englisch, J., & Gray, R. D. (2022). Lexibank, a public repository of standardized wordlists with computed phonological and lexical features. Scientific Data, 9: 316.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Tjuka, A., Forkel, R., & List, J.-M. (2022). Linking norms, ratings, and relations of words and concepts across multiple language varieties. Behavior Research Methods, 54, 864-884.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Bodt, T. A., & List, J.-M. (2022). Reflex prediction: A case study of Western Kho-Bwa. Diachronica.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Lai, Y., & List, J.-M. (2022). [Book review] Geoffrey Sampson: Voices from early China: The odes demystified. 445 pp. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars’ Press, 2020. £67.99. ISBN 978-1-5275-5212-8. Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 85(1), 136-138.
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Hantgan, A., Babiker, H., & List, J.-M. (2022). First steps towards the detection of contact layers in Bangime: A multi-disciplinary, computer-assisted approach. Open Research Europe, 2: 10.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Geisler, H., & List, J.-M. (2022). Of word families and language trees: New and old metaphors in studies on language history. Moderna, 24(1-2), 134-148.
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Jackson, J., Watts, J., List, J.-M., Drabble, R., & Lindquist, K. (2022). From text to thought: How analyzing language can advance psychological science. Perspectives on Psychological Science.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

List, J. M. (2022). Chances and challenges for quantitative approaches in Chinese historical phonology. Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 15, 131-143.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

List, J. M. (2022). Correcting a bias in TIGER rates resulting from high amounts of invariant and singleton cognate sets. Journal of Language Evolution, 7(1), 53-58.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

List, J.-M., Forkel, R., & Hill, N. (2022). A new framework for fast automated phonological reconstruction using trimmed alignments and sound correspondence patterns. In N. Tahmasebi, S. Montariol, A. Kutozov, S. Hengchen, H. Dubossarsky, & L. Borin (Eds.), 3rd international workshop on computational approaches to historical language change 2022: proceedings of the workshop (pp. 89-96). Stroudsburg: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

List, J.-M., Vylomova, E., Forkel, R., Hill, N. W., & Cotterell, R. D. (2022). The SIGTYP 2022 shared task on the prediction of cognate reflexes. In E. Vylomova, E. Ponti, & R. Cotterell (Eds.), SIGTYP 2022: the 4th workshop on computational typology and multilingual NLP: proceedings of the workshop (pp. 52-62). Stroudsburg: Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL).
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Tresoldi, T., Rzymski, C., Forkel, R., Greenhill, S. J., List, J.-M., & Gray, R. D. (2022). Managing historical linguistic data for computational phylogenetics and computer-assisted language comparison. In A. L. Berez-Kroeker, B. McDonnel, & E. Koller (Eds.), The open handbook of linguistic data management (pp. 345-354). Massachusetts: The MIT Press.
Open Access    BibTeX   Endnote   

2021

Evans, C. L., Greenhill, S. J., Watts, J., List, J.-M., Botero, C. A., Gray, R. D., & Kirby, K. (2021). The uses and abuses of tree thinking in cultural evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences, 376(1828): 20200056.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Geisler, H., Forkel, R., & List, J.-M. (2021). A digital, retro-standardized edition of the Tableaux Phonétiques des Patois Suisses Romands (TPPSR). In A. Thibault, M. Avanzi, & N. Lo Vecchio (Eds.), Nouveaux regards sur la variation dialectale – New ways of analyzing dialectal variation (pp. 13-36). Strasbourg: Éditions de Linguistique et de Philologie.
BibTeX   Endnote   

List, J.-M. (2021). Computer-assisted approaches to historical language comparison. Habilitation Thesis, Friedrich-Schiller-Universität, Jena.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

List, J.-M., & Forkel, R. (2021). Automated identification of borrowings in multilingual wordlists. Open Research Europe, 1: 79.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

List, J.-M., Sims, N. A., & Forkel, R. (2021). Toward a sustainable handling of interlinear-glossed text in language documentation. ACM Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, 20(2), 1-15.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

2020

Miller, J. E., Tresoldi, T., Zariquiey, R., Castañón, C. A. B., Morozova, N., & List, J.-M. (2020). Using lexical language models to detect borrowings in monolingual wordlists. PLoS One, 0242709.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

List, J.-M. (2020). Improving data handling and analysis in the study of rhyme patterns. Cahiers de linguistique Asie orientale, 49(1), 43-57.
DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Schweikhard, N. E., & List, J.-M. (2020). Developing an annotation framework for word formation processes in comparative linguistics. SKASE Journal of Theoretical Linguistics, 17(1), 2-26.
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Wu, M.-S., Schweikhard, N. E., Bodt, T. A., Hill, N. W., & List, J.-M. (2020). Computer-Assisted Language Comparison: State of the Art. Journal of Open Humanities Data, 6(2).
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Power, J. M., Grimm, G. W., & List, J.-M. (2020). Evolutionary dynamics in the dispersal of sign languages. Royal Society Open Science, 7(1).
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Rzymski, C., Tresoldi, T., Greenhill, S. J., Wu, M.-S., Schweikhard, N. E., Koptjevskaja-Tamm, M., Gast, V., Bodt, T. A., Hantgan, A., Kaiping, G. A., Chang, S., Lai, Y., Morozova, N., Arjava, H., Hübler, N., Koile, E., Pepper, S., Proos, M., Epps, B. V., Blanco, I., Hundt, C., Monakhov, S., Pianykh, K., Ramesh, S., Gray, R. D., Forkel, R., & List, J.-M. (2020). The database of cross-linguistic colexifications, reproducible analysis of cross-linguistic polysemies. Scientific Data, 7: 13.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Forkel, R., & List, J.-M. (2020). CLDFBench: Give your cross-linguistic data a lift. In N. Calzolari, F. Béchet, P. Blache, K. Choukri, C. Cieri, T. Declerck, S. Goggi, H. Ishara, B. Maegaard, H. M. Mariani, A. Moreno, J. Odijk, & S. Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020) (pp. 6995-7002). Paris: European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

2019

Jackson, J. C., Watts, J., Henry, T. R., List, J.-M., Forkel, R., Mucha, P. J., Greenhill, S. J., Gray, R. D., & Lindquist, K. A. (2019). Emotion semantics show both cultural variation and universal structure. Science, 366, 1517-1522.
DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

List, J.-M. (2019). Beyond edit distances: Comparing linguistic reconstruction systems. Theoretical Linguistics, 45(3-4), 247-258.
DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

List, J.-M. (2019). Automated methods for the investigation of language contact, with a focus on lexical borrowing. Language and Linguistics Compass, 13(10): e12355.
DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Jacques, G., & List, J. M. (2019). Save the trees why we need tree models in linguistic reconstruction (and when we should apply them). Journal of Historical Linguistics, 9(1), 128-166.
DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Bodt, T. A., & List, J.-M. (2019). Testing the predictive strength of the comparative method: An ongoing experiment on unattested words in Western Kho‐Bwa languages. Papers in Historical Phonology, 4, 22-44.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Sagart, L., Jacques, G., Lai, Y., Ryder, R. J., Thouzeau, V., Greenhill, S. J., & List, J.-M. (2019). Dated language phylogenies shed light on the ancestry of Sino-Tibetan. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 116(21), 10317-10322.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

List, J.-M. (2019). Automatic inference of sound correspondence patterns across multiple languages. Computational Linguistics, 45(1), 137-161.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

Hill, N. W., & List, J.-M. (2019). Using Chinese character formation graphs to test proposals in Chinese historical Phonology. Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 12(2), 186-200.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

List, J.-M., Hill, N. W., & Foster, C. J. (2019). Towards a standardized annotation of rhyme judgments in Chinese historical phonology (and beyond). Journal of Language Relationship, 17(1), 26-43.
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List, J.-M., Lai, Y., & Starostin, G. S. (2019). „Old chinese and friends“: New approaches to historical linguistics of the Sino-Tibetan area. Journal of Language Relationship, 17(1-2).
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2018

Forkel, R., List, J.-M., Greenhill, S. J., Rzymski, C., Bank, S., Cysouw, M., Hammarström, H., Haspelmath, M., Kaiping, G. A., & Gray, R. D. (2018). Cross-Linguistic Data Formats, advancing data sharing and re-use in comparative linguistics. Scientific Data, 5: 180205.
Open Access    DOI    BibTeX   Endnote   

List, M., Walworth, M., Greenhill, S. J., Tresoldi, T., & Forkel, R. (2018). Sequence comparison in computational historical linguistics. Journal of Language Evolution, 3(2), 130-144.
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Rama, T., List, J.-M., Wahle, J., & Jäger, G. (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 (pp. 393-400). Association for Computational Linguistics.
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Anderson, C., Tresoldi, T., Chacon, T., Fehn, A.-M., Walworth, M., Forkel, R., & List, J.-M. (2018). A cross-linguistic database of phonetic transcription systems. Yearbook of the Poznan Linguistic Meeting, 4(1), 21-53.
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Jäger, G., & List, J.-M. (2018). Using ancestral state reconstruction methods for onomasiological reconstruction in multilingual word lists. Language Dynamics and Change, 8(1), 22-54.
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List, J.-M., Greenhill, S. J., Anderson, C., Mayer, T., Tresoldi, T., & Forkel, R. (2018). CLICS2: An improved database of cross-linguistic colexifications assembling lexical data with the help of cross-linguistic data formats. Linguistic Typology, 22(2), 277-306.
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2017

Hill, N. W., & List, J.-M. (2017). Challenges of annotation and analysis in computer-assisted language comparison: A case study on Burmish languages. Yearbook of the Poznan Linguistic Meeting, 3(1), 47-76.
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List, J.-M. (2017). A web-based interactive tool for creating, inspecting, editing, and publishing etymological datasets. In Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) (Ed.), Proceedings of the 15. EACL 2017 Software Demonstrations, Valencia, Spain, April 3-7 2017 (pp. 9-12). Stroudsburg PA, USA: ACL.
BibTeX   Endnote   

List, J.-M., Greenhill, S. J., & Gray, R. D. (2017). The Potential of automatic word comparison for historical linguistics. PLoS One, 12(1): 0170046.
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List, J.-M. (2017). Contraction. In R. Sybesma (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Chinese language and linguistics (pp. 672-675). Leiden and Boston: Brill.
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List, J.-M. (2017). Fāngyán 方言. In R. Sybesma (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Chinese language and linguistics (pp. 219-225). Leiden and Boston: Brill.
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List, J.-M. (2017). Using network models to analyze Old Chinese rhyme data. Bulletin of Chinese Linguistics, 9(2), 218-241.
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List, J.-M., Pathmanathan, J. S., Hill, N. W., Bapteste, E., & Lopez, P. (2017). Vowel purity and rhyme evidence in Old Chinese reconstruction. Lingua sinica, 3: 5.
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2016

List, J.-M., Pathmanathan, J. S., Lopez, P., & Bapteste, E. (2016). Unity and disunity in evolutionary sciences: Process-based analogies open common research avenues for biology and linguistics. Biology Direct, 11(1): 39.
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2014

List, J.-M., Nelson-Sathi, S., Geisler, H., & Martin, W. (2014). Networks of lexical borrowing and lateral gene transfer in language and genome evolution. Bioessays, 36(2), 141-150.
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List, J.-M., Nelson-Sathi, S., Martin, W., & Geisler, H. (2014). Using phylogenetic networks to model Chinese dialect history. Language Dynamics and Change, 4(2), 222-252.
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2012

List, J.-M. (2012). SCA: Phonetic alignment based on sound classes. In D. Lassite, & M. Slavkovik (Eds.), New Directions in Logic, Language and Computation: ESSLLI 2010 and ESSLLI 2011 Student Sessions. Selected Papers (pp. 32-51). Berlin, Heidelberg: Imprint: Springer.
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2011

Holman, E. W., Brown, C. H., Wichmann, S., Müller, A., Velupillai, V., Hammarström, H., Sauppe, S., Jung, H., Bakker, D., Brown, P., Belyaev, O., Urban, M., Mailhammer, R., List, J.-M., & Egorov, D. (2011). Automated dating of the world's language families based on lexical similarity. Current Anthropology, 52(6), 841-875.
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Nelson-Sathi, S., List, J.-M., Geisler, H., Fangerau, H., Gray, R. D., Martin, W., & Dagan, T. (2011). Networks uncover hidden lexical borrowing in Indo-European language evolution. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 278(1713), 1794-1803.
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2010

Wichmann, S., Holman, E. W., Müller, A., Velupillai, V., List, J.-M., Belyaev, O., Urban, M., & Bakker, D. (2010). Glottochronology as a heuristic for genealogical language relationships. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, 17(4), 303-316.
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