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<Paper uid="P98-1043">
  <Title>Alignment of Multiple Languages for Historical Comparison</Title>
  <Section position="1" start_page="0" end_page="0" type="abstr">
    <SectionTitle>
Abstract
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> An essential step in comparative reconstruction is to align corresponding phonological segments in the words being compared. To do this, one must search among huge numbers of potential alignments to find those that give a good phonetic fit. This is a hard computational problem, and it becomes exponentially more difficult when more than two strings are being aligned.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> In this paper I extend the guided-search alignment algorithm of Covington (Computational Linguistics, 1996) to handle more than two strings. The resulting algorithm has been implemented in Prolog and gives reasonable results when tested on data from several languages.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
class="xml-element"></Paper>