A Likelihood Ratio Test of Genetic Relationship among Languages

V.S.D.S.Mahesh Akavarapu, Arnab Bhattacharya


Abstract
Lexical resemblances among a group of languages indicate that the languages could be genetically related, i.e., they could have descended from a common ancestral language. However, such resemblances can arise by chance and, hence, need not always imply an underlying genetic relationship. Many tests of significance based on permutation of wordlists and word similarity measures appeared in the past to determine the statistical significance of such relationships. We demonstrate that although existing tests may work well for bilateral comparisons, i.e., on pairs of languages, they are either infeasible by design or are prone to yield false positives when applied to groups of languages or language families. To this end, inspired by molecular phylogenetics, we propose a likelihood ratio test to determine if given languages are related based on the proportion of invariant character sites in the aligned wordlists applied during tree inference. Further, we evaluate some language families and show that the proposed test solves the problem of false positives. Finally, we demonstrate that the test supports the existence of macro language families such as Nostratic and Macro-Mayan.
Anthology ID:
2024.naacl-long.141
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2559–2570
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.141
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
V.S.D.S.Mahesh Akavarapu and Arnab Bhattacharya. 2024. A Likelihood Ratio Test of Genetic Relationship among Languages. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2559–2570, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Likelihood Ratio Test of Genetic Relationship among Languages (Akavarapu & Bhattacharya, NAACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.naacl-long.141.pdf
Copyright:
 2024.naacl-long.141.copyright.pdf