Automatic Detection of Cognates Using Orthographic Alignment

Words undergo various changes when entering new languages. Based on the assumption that these linguistic changes follow certain rules, we propose a method for automatically detecting pairs of cognates employing an orthographic alignment method which proved relevant for sequence alignment in computational biology. We use aligned subsequences as features for machine learning algorithms in order to infer rules for linguistic changes undergone by words when entering new languages and to discriminate between cognates and non-cognates. Given a list of known cognates, our approach does not require any other linguistic information. However, it can be customized to integrate historical information regarding language evolution.