Re: Unknown Language Identifier!
| From: | Boudewijn Rempt <bsarempt@...> |
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| Date: | Monday, January 29, 2001, 16:32 |
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On Mon, 29 Jan 2001, John Cowan wrote:
> J Matthew Pearson wrote:
>
>
> > Wearing my linguist hat, I have to say that I'm extremely dubious that
> > this would be useful tool in determining the relatedness of languages.
>
> In all fairness, it's not meant for that. It's meant when you have
> a sample of an unknown (to you) language, and want to know where to
> go with it. That being so, strong superficial resemblance is usually
> what you want.
>
Well, that's what I thought when I read the algorithm; but the autor
actually claims that his tool will show relatedness: ' it is likely
that IF the highest scoring language is not correct, it is at least
related to the correct language. '. And his dissertation was on 'The
Genetic Classification of Languages by n-Gram Analysis: A Computational
Technique'.
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org