Comparative Evaluation of String Similarity Measures for Automatic Language Classification

Abstract

Historical linguistics, the oldest branch of modern linguistics, deals with language-relatedness and language change across space and time. Historical linguists apply the widely-tested comparative method [Durie and Ross, 1996] to establish relationships between languages to posit a language family and to reconstruct the proto-language for a language family. Although historical linguistics has parallel origins with biology [Atkinson and Gray, 2005], unlike the biologists, mainstream historical linguists have seldom been enthusiastic about using quantitative methods for the discovery of language relationships or investigating the structure of a language family, except for Kroeber and Chretien [1937] and Ellegard [1959]. A short period of enthusiastic application of quantitative methods initiated by Swadesh [1950] ended with the heavy criticism levelled against it by Bergsland and Vogt [1962]. The field of computational historical linguistics did not receive much attention again until the beginning of the 1990s, with the exception of two noteworthy doctoral dissertations, by Sankoff [1969] and Embleton [1986].