A central problem in historical linguistics is the identification of historically related cognate words. We present a generative phylogenetic model for automatically inducing cognate group structure from unaligned word lists. Our model represents the process of transformation and transmission from ancestor word to daughter word, as well as the alignment between the words lists of the observed l...

In this paper we describe an approach to automatic cognate identification in monolingual texts using machine translation. This system was used as our entry in the 2015 ALTA shared task, achieving an F1score of 63% on the test set. Our proposed approach takes an input text in a source language and uses statistical machine translation to create a word-aligned parallel text in the target language....