A Benchmark Database of Phonetic Alignments in Historical Linguistics and Dialectology

Johann-Mattis List, Jelena Prokić


Abstract
In the last two decades, alignment analyses have become an important technique in quantitative historical linguistics and dialectology. Phonetic alignment plays a crucial role in the identification of regular sound correspondences and deeper genealogical relations between and within languages and language families. Surprisingly, up to today, there are no easily accessible benchmark data sets for phonetic alignment analyses. Here we present a publicly available database of manually edited phonetic alignments which can serve as a platform for testing and improving the performance of automatic alignment algorithms. The database consists of a great variety of alignments drawn from a large number of different sources. The data is arranged in a such way that typical problems encountered in phonetic alignment analyses (metathesis, diversity of phonetic sequences) are represented and can be directly tested.
Anthology ID:
L14-1269
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
288–294
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/299_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Johann-Mattis List and Jelena Prokić. 2014. A Benchmark Database of Phonetic Alignments in Historical Linguistics and Dialectology. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 288–294, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
A Benchmark Database of Phonetic Alignments in Historical Linguistics and Dialectology (List & Prokić, LREC 2014)
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PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/299_Paper.pdf