Quantifying Uncertainty in Phylogenetic Studies of the Slavonic Languages

We describe the application of Bayesian methods to accommodate the uncertainty problem in phylogenetic reconstruction with an example of the Slavonic languages family. Comparative studies of languages have lots in common with evolutionary biology studies. Stable linguistic characters (e.g. word form...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Procedia computer science 2013, Vol.18, p.2269-2277
Main Authors: Nurbakova, Diana, Rusakov, Sergey, Alexandrov, Vassil
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bayesian inference
language evolution
phylogeny
Slavonic languages
uncertainty
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:We describe the application of Bayesian methods to accommodate the uncertainty problem in phylogenetic reconstruction with an example of the Slavonic languages family. Comparative studies of languages have lots in common with evolutionary biology studies. Stable linguistic characters (e.g. word forms from the basic vocabulary, grammar characters) can be used to construct DNA-like sequences that the phylogenetic reconstruction methods can then be applied to. Linguistic data is known to be a subject of noise and error of different kinds causing conflicting signals and uncertainty within a phylogeny. Bayesian methods help to quantify the uncertainty. The comparison with the Damerau-Levenshtein distance-based tree is also given.
ISSN:1877-0509
1877-0509
DOI:10.1016/j.procs.2013.05.398