Comparative wordlists play a crucial role for historical language comparison. They are regularly used for the identification of related words and languages, or for the reconstruction of language phylogenies and proto-languages. While automated solutions exist for the majority of methods used for this purpose, no standardized computational or computer-assisted approaches for the compilation of comparative wordlists have been proposed so far. Up to today, scholars compile wordlists by sifting manually through dictionaries or similar language resources and typing them into spreadsheets. In this study we present a semi-automatic approach to extract wordlists from machine-readable dictionaries. The transparent workflow allows to build user-defined wordlists for individual languages in a standardized format. By automating the search for translation equivalents in dictionaries, our approach greatly facilitates the aggregation of individual resources into multilingual comparative wordlists that can be used for a variety of purposes.

Despite the inherently fuzzy nature of reconstructions in historical linguistics, most scholars do not represent their uncertainty when proposing proto-forms. With the increasing success of recently proposed approaches to automating certain aspects of the traditional comparative method, the formal representation of proto-forms has also improved. This formalization makes it possible to address both the representation and the computation of uncertainty. Building on recent advances in supervised phonological reconstruction, during which an algorithm learns how to reconstruct words in a given proto-language relying on previously annotated data, and inspired by improved methods for automated word prediction from cognate sets, we present a new framework that allows for the representation of uncertainty in linguistic reconstruction and also includes a workflow for the computation of fuzzy reconstructions from linguistic data.

Sound correspondence patterns form the basis of cognate detection and phonological reconstruction in historical language comparison. Methods for the automatic inference of correspondence patterns from phonetically aligned cognate sets have been proposed, but their application to multilingual wordlists requires extremely well annotated datasets. Since annotation is tedious and time consuming, it would be desirable to find ways to improve aligned cognate data automatically. Taking inspiration from trimming techniques in evolutionary biology, which improve alignments by excluding problematic sites, we propose a workflow that trims phonetic alignments in comparative linguistics prior to the inference of correspondence patterns. Testing these techniques on a large standardized collection of ten datasets with expert annotations from different language families, we find that the best trimming technique substantially improves the overall consistency of the alignments, showing a clear increase in the proportion of frequent correspondence patterns and words exhibiting regular cognate relations.

This work presents two experiments with the goal of replicating the transferability of dependency parsers and POS taggers trained on closely related languages within the low-resource language family Tupían. The experiments include both zero-shot settings as well as multilingual models. Previous studies have found that even a comparably small treebank from a closely related language will improve sequence labelling considerably in such cases. Results from both POS tagging and dependency parsing confirm previous evidence that the closer the phylogenetic relation between two languages, the better the predictions for sequence labelling tasks get. In many cases, the results are improved if multiple languages from the same family are combined. This suggests that in addition to leveraging similarity between two related languages, the incorporation of multiple languages of the same family might lead to better results in transfer learning for NLP applications.

In this paper, we launch a new Universal Dependencies treebank for an endangered language from Amazonia: Kakataibo, a Panoan language spoken in Peru. We first discuss the collaborative methodology implemented, which proved effective to create a treebank in the context of a Computational Linguistic course for undergraduates. Then, we describe the general details of the treebank and the language-specific considerations implemented for the proposed annotation. We finally conduct some experiments on part-of-speech tagging and syntactic dependency parsing. We focus on monolingual and transfer learning settings, where we study the impact of a Shipibo-Konibo treebank, another Panoan language resource.