This repository provides source code and data for the paper on the potential of automatic word comparison for historical linguistics (List, Greenhill, and Gray).

You will need LingPy (v >= 2.5, http://github.com/lingpy.lingpy), python-igraph (http://igraph.org/python-igraph), and the requirements which are needed for both packages. You will also need R if you want to make all plots that we prepared for the analyses.

To simply run all analyses, open your terminal, make sure you cd ino the folder and type:

$ make all

This will run both the training and the test analyses. Note, however, that this analyses uses the results of the Monte-Carlo permutation, which is very time-consuming, and whose results we submit along with the data-files which have a "bin.tsv" extension. If you want to re-run the Monte-Carlo permutation, you should first remove these files from the directory. You can also do this by typing:

$ make clean

If you run the analyses along with the Monte-Carlo permutation, this will take some time. All code pieces which you need to run the analyses are prefixed by C_ in the file-collection.

All datasets in this sample are prefixed by D_. There are 12 datasets, 6 training datasets, prefixed by D_training, and 6 test datasets, prefixed by D_test. For the sources of the data, please consult the paper, which is submitted along with this repository.

The Infomap plugin (see the pape for details) is in the file P_infomap.py. As of lingpy-2.5, this plugin is also regularly integrated into the library. However, this repository provides the original version that uses it as a plugin to lingpy.

There are four kinds of output created by the scripts:

• simple tsv-files, all prefixed with O_+test or training, depending on which file was analyzed,
• plots, all prefixed with I_
• LaTeX tables, all prefixed with T_
• txt-result files, all prefixed with R_

If you run into problems or have further questions regarding the data, please contact us writing an email to info@lingpy.org.