%0 Conference Proceedings
%A Haynie, Hannah J.
%A Blasi, Damián
%A Skirgård, Hedvig
%A Greenhill, Simon J.
%A Atkinson, Quentin D.
%A Gray, Russell D.
%+ Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Max Planck Society
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Max Planck Society
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Max Planck Society
Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Max Planck Society
%T Grambank’s typological advances support computational research on diverse languages : 
%G eng
%U https://hdl.handle.net/21.11116/0000-000D-1213-9
%D 2023
%B SIGTYP 2023 : 5th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP
%Z date of event: 2023-05-02 - 2023-05-06
%C Dubrovnik, Croatia
%9 invited
%X Sound correspondence patterns form the basis of cognate detection and phonological reconstruction in historical language comparison. Methods for the automatic inference of correspondence patterns from phonetically aligned cognate sets have been proposed, but their application to multilingual wordlists requires extremely well annotated datasets. Since annotation is tedious and time consuming, it would be desirable to find ways to improve aligned cognate data automatically. Taking inspiration from trimming techniques in evolutionary biology, which improve alignments by excluding problematic sites, we propose a workflow that trims phonetic alignments in comparative linguistics prior to the inference of correspondence patterns. Testing these techniques on a large standardized collection of ten datasets with expert annotations from different language families, we find that the best trimming technique substantially improves the overall consistency of the alignments, showing a clear increase in the proportion of frequent correspondence patterns and words exhibiting regular cognate relations.
%B The 5th workshop on research in computational linguistic typology and multilingual NLP : proceedings of the workshop
%E Beinborn, Lisa; Goswami, Koustava; Muradoğlu, Saliha; Sorokin, Alexey; Kumar, Ritesh; Scherbakov, Andreas; Ponti, Edoardo M.; Cotterell, Ryan; Vylomova, Ekaterina
%P 147 - 149
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%@ 978-1-959429-56-2