{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/are-automatic-methods-for-cognate-detection","title":"Are Automatic Methods for Cognate Detection Good Enough for Phylogenetic Reconstruction in Historical Linguistics?","arxiv_id":"1804.05416","date":"2018-04-15","proceeding":"NAACL 2018 6","authors":["Taraka Rama","Johann-Mattis List","Johannes Wahle","Gerhard Jäger"],"abstract":"We evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art algorithms for automatic\ncognate detection by comparing how useful automatically inferred cognates are\nfor the task of phylogenetic inference compared to classical manually annotated\ncognate sets. Our findings suggest that phylogenies inferred from automated\ncognate sets come close to phylogenies inferred from expert-annotated ones,\nalthough on average, the latter are still superior. We conclude that future\nwork on phylogenetic reconstruction can profit much from automatic cognate\ndetection. Especially where scholars are merely interested in exploring the\nbigger picture of a language family's phylogeny, algorithms for automatic\ncognate detection are a useful complement for current research on language\nphylogenies.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1804.05416v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.05416v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"are-automatic-methods-for-cognate-detection","repo_url":"https://github.com/PhyloStar/AutoCogPhylo","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1804.05416","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}