Word Similarity Metrics and Multilateral Comparison

Abstract

Phylogenetic analyses of languages need to explicitly address whether the languages under consideration are related to each other at all. Recently developed permutation tests allow this question to be explored by testing whether words in one set of languages are significantly more similar to those in another set of languages when paired up by semantics than when paired up at random. Seven different phonetic similarity metrics are implemented and evaluated on their effectiveness within such multilateral comparison systems when deployed to detect genetic relations among the Indo-European and Uralic language families.