Robert Forkel

Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution
Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Deutscher Platz 6
04103 Leipzig
e-mail: robert_forkel@[>>> Please remove the text! <<<]eva.mpg.de
About me

I am a scientific programmer, focusing on software to aggregate, curate and publish large databases for linguistic and cultural research. I am also interested in how data is used in research, in particular regarding aspects like reproducibility, and contribute to software packages such as LingPy.
Curriculum Vitae
since 2018 | Head of the research data management group at DLCE |
2014-2017 | Scientific Programmer in the CLLD project |
2007-2012 | Scientific Programmer at the Max Planck Digital Library |
1994-2000 | MA in Mathematics. University Regensburg. Thesis title: "Effektive Berechnung von Residuenabbildungen" |
Publications
In press
Hermann, A., Gutiérrez, P., Chauvel, C., Maury, R., Liorzou, C., Willie, E., Philipp, I., Forkel, R., Rzymski, C., & Bedford, S. (in press). Artefact geochemistry demonstrates long-distance voyaging in the Polynesian Outliers. Science Advances. |
2022
Tjuka, A., Forkel, R., & List, J.-M. (2022). Curating and extending data for language comparison in Concepticon and NoRaRe [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]. Open Research Europe. |
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Barbieri, C., Blasi, D. E., Arango-Isaza, E., Sotiropoulos, A. G., Hammerström, H., Wichmann, S., Greenhill, S. J., Gray, R. D., Forkel, R., Bickel, B., & Shimizu, K. K. (2022). A global analysis of matches and mismatches between human genetic and linguistic histories. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(47): e2122084119. |
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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. |
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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. |
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Forkel, R., & Hammarström, H. (2022). Glottocodes: identifiers linking families, languages and dialects to comprehensive reference information. Semantic Web, 917-924. |
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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). |
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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). |
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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. |
2021
Forkel, R., & Hammarström, H. (2021). Glottocodes: identifiers linking families, languages and dialects. Semantics Web Journal, 2685-3899. Retrieved from http://www.semantic-web-journal.net/content/glottocodes-identifiers-linking-families-languages-and-dialects. |
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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. |
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List, J.-M., & Forkel, R. (2021). Automated identification of borrowings in multilingual wordlists. Open Research Europe, 1: 79. |
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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. |
2020
Hermann, A., Forkel, R., McAlister, A., Cruickshank, A., Golitko, M., Kneebone, B., McCoy, M., Reepmeyer, C., Sheppard, P., Sinton, J., & Weisler, M. (2020). Pofatu, a curated and open-access database for geochemical sourcing of archaeological materials. Scientific Data, 7(1): 141. |
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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. |
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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). |
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. |
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. |
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Hammarström, H., Castermans, T., Forkel, R., Verbeek, K., Westenberg, M. A., & Speckmann, B. (2018). Simultaneous visualization of language endangerment and language description. Language Documentation & Conservation, 12, 359-392. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/10125/24792. |
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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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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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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. |
2017
Maurits, L., Forkel, R., Kaiping, G. A., & Atkinson, Q. D. (2017). BEASTling: A software tool for linguistic phylogenetics using BEAST 2. PLoS One, 12(8): e0180908. |
2016
List, J.-M., Cysouw, M., & Forkel, R. (2016). Concepticon: A resource for the linking of concept lists. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, May 23-28, 2016, Portorož, Slovenia (pp. 2393-2400). |
2015
Naumann, C., Moran, S., & Forkel, R. (Eds.). (2015). Tsammalex: A lexical database on plants and animals. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Retrieved from http://tsammalex.clld.org. |
2014
Forkel, R. (2014). The Cross-Linguistic Linked Data project. In 3rd Workshop on Linked Data in Linguistics: Multilingual knowledge resources and natural language processing (pp. 60-66). |
2013
Nordhoff, S., Hammarström, H., Forkel, R., & Haspelmath, M. (Eds.). (2013). Glottolog 2.0. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. Retrieved from http://glottolog.org/. |