Recently, I was asked by a colleague how one could query only those datasets in the Lexibank repository which come with cognate sets annotated by humans. While I first thought this could be done in a very straightforward way, I figeured out, when trying it myself, that the code still…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
With the introduction of CLDF as a major format for data exchange, there is an increased need in handy solutions for the conversion of CLDF to the formats required by computer-assisted tools like LingPy and EDICTOR, which allow to preprocess data automatically or to curate data by adding detailed annotations.…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
Colleagues often ask us how they could receive more detailed information on specific languages and colexifications in the CLICS database. With the publication of the CL Toolkit package, which allows to merge several CLDF datasets on the fly, carrying out analyses on certain parts of the data underlying the CLICS…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
Mapping concepts to common concept identifiers across resources has become an important task for the aggregation of lexical data from different sources. With the Concepticon, this task has been facilitated due to a specific mapping algorithm by which a concept list can be automatically mapped to the concept sets in…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
Mapping concepts to common concept identifiers across resources has become an important task for the aggregation of lexical data from different sources. With the Concepticon, this task has been facilitated due to a specific mapping algorithm by which a concept list can be automatically mapped to the concept sets in…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
A few days ago, Sidwell and Alwes submitted a very nice dataset on Vietic languages to Zenodo (10.5281/zenodo.5263194). When inspecting the data, I realized that this dataset could be easily converted to our CLDF formats in our new Lexibank standards. Since both authors explicitly invited for discussions of the data…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
The scientific culture in linguistics has been changing recently, and more and more papers are published with code and data accompanying them. What is still often forgotten, however, is that code and data should also be shared with the reviewers during the first submission of a paper in order to…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
With the recent publication of the new version of the EDICTOR application for the curation and creation of etymological dictionaries, several new features were introduced which target specifically the annoation of language-internal word families opposed to cross-linguistic cognates. While working on the EDICTOR update, I carried out intensive tests of…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
Writing reviews for a journal is one of those things which most scientists never actively learn. For laypeople, this may be surprising, given how often the scientific method with its rigorous peer review procedure is being mentioned in the news nowadays. How can it be, one may ask oneself, that…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
I cannot remember when I decided to become a linguist. I cannot even remember when I first called myself a linguist (as opposed to a student, a Sinologist, or a scientist). But I can remember when I wrote my first review for a linguistics journal, and I also remember that…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
In times where home office is an obligation rather than an option, I have finally found time to create a first draft version of a web-based tool for interactive rhyme annotation. The tool is written in plain JavaScript, without any additional libraries, and supports the inline rhyme annotation format which…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
The CLICS database in its current format makes direct use of the data assembled by the Concepticon project in order to aggregate lexical data from different sources. At the same time, the CLICS database itself can be seen as an interesting conceptlist, providing information on concept polysemy and semantic similarity.…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
While the core of the Concepticon project (https://concepticon.clld.org, List et al. 2019) are the numerous conceptlists which are constantly being added by the growing list of contributors, we have already from the beginning of the project, with the first version (List et al. 2016) tried to collect various kinds of…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
Having seen how we can obtain a simple scorer derived from the feature system in CLTS (List et al. 2019) in last month’s post, what is missing now, in order to use the scorer for alignment analyses, is an alignment function which can take the scorer as an argument. If…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
In the past, people have repeatedly asked me how they could use their own scoring functions in combination with LingPy’s alignment algorithms. Their major concern was that the sound-class-based scoring systems we use in LingPy might fail to reflect true phonetic similarity of sounds, specifically also because they are not…
Johann-Mattis List · Computer-Assisted Language Comparison in Practice
During the 24th International Conference of Historical Linguistics, I was asked by a colleague whether I would know a good way to align and scores sentences available in form of phonetic transcriptions. While it is clear that one can roughly compare the difference between sequences rather easily by aligning them,…
