An Open Source Toolkit for Quantitative Historical Linguistics

Abstract

Given the increasing interest and development of computational and quantitative methods in historical linguistics, it is important that scholars have a basis for documenting, testing, evaluating, and sharing complex workflows. We present a novel open-source toolkit for quantitative tasks in historical linguistics that offers these features. This toolkit also serves as an interface between existing software packages and frequently used data formats, and it provides implementations of new and existing algorithms within a homogeneous framework. We illustrate the toolkit’s functionality with an exemplary workflow that starts with raw language data and ends with automatically calculated phonetic alignments, cognates and borrowings. We then illustrate evaluation metrics on gold standard datasets that are provided with the toolkit.