Computational approaches in historical linguistics have made great progress during the past two decades. As of now, it is much more common to propose subgroupings based on phylogenetic analyses than on traditional considerations using shared innovations. We have also seen a drastic increase in openly available datasets that share cognate judgments for various language families. Thanks to new standardization efforts providing facilitated access to several dozen comparative wordlists, it seems about time to work on on improved benchmarks of manually annotated cognates in computational historical linguistics. In this study, a first effort of this kind is undertaken, by presenting Lexibench, a preliminary gold standard for computational historical linguistics. Lexibench builds on the Lexibank repository to extract 63 multilingual wordlists, all manually annotated for cognacy, that can be used to assess the quality of cognate detection and phylogenetic reconstruction methods in computational historical linguistics.
Continue reading
Tag Archives: Lexibank
Using CLDFBench and PyLexibank on Windows
Using tools such as CLDFBench and PyLexibank, datasets can be converted into Cross-Linguistic Data Formats (CLDF), offering a standardized and interoperable representation of linguistic data. While these tools are powerful, lifting datasets to CLDF can present unique challenges for Windows users due to idiosyncrasies in the Windows operating system. Although CLDFBench and PyLexibank are compatible with Windows, certain workarounds may be necessary to address system-specific issues. This guide aims to demonstrate how CLDFBench and PyLexibank can be effectively installed and used on a Windows computer to lift a dataset to CLDF.
Parsing IPA Transcriptions with CLTS
The Cross-Linguistic Transcription Systems (CLTS, https://clts.clld.org) project serves as a reference catalogue for speech sounds. At the core of the project is a generative method that parses existing IPA transcriptions (or transcriptions in other supported transcription systems) and checks if they conform to the principles and components laid out in the reference catalogue. As a result, Cross-Linguistic Transcription Systems is much more than a simple list of possible speech sounds transcribed in the International Phonetic Alphabet, but a system that allows to generate possible speech sounds and to check if sounds provided in various transcription systems contain problems. This study gives a short overview on the basic ideas that lead to the creation of the database and the parsing method and provides some examples showing how it can be employed in practice.
Retrieving and Analyzing Taste Colexifications from Lexibank
Colexifications have enjoyed a considerable amount of popularity in the recent years. However, there are still many semantic domains, where not much research on colexification patterns has been carried out so far. Here we show, how the recently published Lexibank repository can be queried to yield colexification data on taste colexifications which can in turn be easily plotted on geographic maps.
Querying Datasets with Cognates in the Lexibank Repository
Recently, I was asked by a colleague how one could query only those datasets in the Lexibank repository which come with cognate sets annotated by humans. While I first thought this could be done in a very straightforward way, I figeured out, when trying it myself, that the code still needs some workarounds. As a result, I thought it is best to share the solution I came up with in a blog post in order to make it accessible to colleagues who might be interested in inspecting and using the data provided by the Lexibank repository in more detail.
Converting Streitberg’s Gothic Dictionary to a CLDF Wordlist on a Windows System
I recently converted the Gothic dictionary written by Wilhelm Streitberg to a CLDF wordlist. Since I was using Windows, I had some difficulties during the conversion progress, which Unix system users may not have to deal with. I thought it would be useful to share my experience here and point out that users of Windows operating systems should be aware of certain aspects when converting data to CLDF.