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<Paper uid="P06-1035">
  <Title>Measuring Language Divergence by Intra-Lexical Comparison</Title>
  <Section position="8" start_page="278" end_page="278" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
6 Conclusions and Future Directions
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> In this paper, we have presented a distance-based method, called PHILOLOGICON, that constructs genetic trees on the basis of lexica from each language. The method only compares words language-internally, where comparison seems both psychologically real and reliable,  tributions in the reconstruction of English and Swedish. Information levels are shown translated so that the average is zero.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> and never cross-linguistically, where comparison is less well-founded. It uses measures founded in information theory to compare the intra-lexical differences.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> The method successfully, if not perfectly, recreated the phylogenetic tree of Indo-European languages on the basis of noisy data. In further work, we plan to improve both the quantity and the quality of the data. Since most of the mis-placements on the tree could be accounted for by contact phenomena, it is possible that a network-drawing, rather than tree-drawing, analysis would produce better results.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Likewise, we plan to develop the method for identifying cognates. The key improvement needed is a way to distinguish indeterminate distances in reconstructed lexical metrics from determinate but uniform ones. This may be achieved by retaining information about the distribution of the original values which were combined to form the reconstructed metric.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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