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arXiv Computation and Language By Tim Wientzek

Self-Supervised Lexical Representation Learning for Fast, Large-Scale Phylogenetic Inference

Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →

The paper presents a fully self‑supervised contrastive learning framework that learns lexical representations from raw IPA‑transcribed wordlists without any cognacy annotations or expert input. Using a dual contrastive objective—word‑level and language‑level losses—the model produces word representations that enable fast computation of pairwise language distances and the inference of a global phylogenetic tree for 3,399 language varieties. The resulting tree achieves a generalized quartet distance competitive with baselines while requiring only minutes of computation on a standard notebook GPU, and the representations also capture diachronic concept stability.

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