2025/03/01 by David Snee, Luca Ciucci, Snee, David +7 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Topic Modeling
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2503.00464
openalex publication_date 2025/03/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Multilingual wordlists play a crucial role in comparative linguistics. While many studies have been carried out to test the power of computational methods for language subgrouping or divergence time estimation, few studies have put the data upon which these studies are based to a rigorous test. Here, we conduct a first experiment that tests the robustness of concept translation as an integral part of the compilation of multilingual wordlists. Investigating the variation in concept translations in independently compiled wordlists from 10 dataset pairs covering 9 different language families, we find that on average, only 83% of all translations yield the same word form, while identical forms in terms of phonetic transcriptions can only be found in 23% of all cases. Our findings can prove important when trying to assess the uncertainty of phylogenetic studies and the conclusions derived from them.