LexStat: Automatic Detection of Cognates in Multilingual Wordlists

Abstract: In this paper, a new method for automatic cognate detection in multilingual wordlists will be presented. The main idea behind the method is to combine different approaches to sequence comparison in historical linguistics and evolutionary biology into a new framework which closely models the most important aspects of the comparative method. The method is implemented as a Python program and provides a convenient tool which is publicly available, easily applicable, and open for further testing and improvement. Testing the method on a large gold standard of IPA-encoded wordlists showed that its results are highly consistent and outperform previous methods.