Alignment of Multiple Languages for Historical Comparison

An essential step in comparative reconstruction is to align corresponding phonological segments in the words being compared. To do this, one must search among huge numbers of potential alignments to find those that give a good phonetic fit. This is a hard computational problem, and it becomes exponentially more difficult when more than two strings are being aligned. In this paper I extend the guidedsearch alignment algorithm of Covington (Computational Linguistics, 1996) to handle more than two strings. The resulting algorithm has been implemented in Prolog and gives reasonable results when tested on data from several languages. 1 Background The Comparative Method for reconstructing languages consists of at least the following steps:

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: ACL
• Authors: Michael A. Covington
• Keywords: ACL 1998, ACL 2007, Comparative Reconstruction, Corresponding Phonological Segments, Hard Computational Problem