Kenji Yamauchi


2018

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Building A Handwritten Cuneiform Character Imageset
Kenji Yamauchi | Hajime Yamamoto | Wakaha Mori
Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)

2016

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Contrasting Vertical and Horizontal Transmission of Typological Features
Kenji Yamauchi | Yugo Murawaki
Proceedings of COLING 2016, the 26th International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Technical Papers

Linguistic typology provides features that have a potential of uncovering deep phylogenetic relations among the world’s languages. One of the key challenges in using typological features for phylogenetic inference is that horizontal (spatial) transmission obscures vertical (phylogenetic) signals. In this paper, we characterize typological features with respect to the relative strength of vertical and horizontal transmission. To do this, we first construct (1) a spatial neighbor graph of languages and (2) a phylogenetic neighbor graph by collapsing known language families. We then develop an autologistic model that predicts a feature’s distribution from these two graphs. In the experiments, we managed to separate vertically and/or horizontally stable features from unstable ones, and the results are largely consistent with previous findings.