@inProceedings{rama-prasanth-2012-good-165075, title = {How good are typological distances for determining genealogical relationships among languages?}, abstract = {The recent availability of typological databases such as World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) has spurred investigations regarding its utility for classifying the world’s languages, the stability of typological features in genetic linguistics and typological universals across the language families of the world. In this paper, we compare typological distances, derived from fifteen vector similarity measures, with family internal classifications and also lexical divergence. These results are only a first step towards the use of WALS database in the projection of NLP resources and bootstrapping NLP tools for typologically or genetically similar, yet resource-poor languages. }, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 24th International Conference on Computational Linguistics}, author = {Rama, Taraka and Prasanth, Kolachina}, year = {2012}, } @inProceedings{rama-2012-gram-159106, title = {N-gram approaches to the historical dynamics of basic vocabulary}, booktitle = {Preproceedings of Computational approaches to the study of dialectal and typological variation }, author = {Rama, Taraka}, year = {2012}, } @inProceedings{rama-borin-2012-properties-164449, title = {Properties of phoneme N -grams across the world’s language families}, abstract = {In this article, we investigate the properties of phoneme N -grams across half of the world’s languages. The sizes of three different N -gram distributions of the world’s language families obey a power law. Further, the N -gram distributions of language families parallel the sizes of the families, which also follow a power law distribution. The correlation between N -gram distributions and language family sizes improves with increasing values of N . The study also raises some new questions about the use of N -gram distributions in linguistic research, which we hope to be able to investigate in the future.}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Fourth Swedish Language Technology Conference (SLTC)}, author = {Rama, Taraka and Borin, Lars}, year = {2012}, }