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<Paper uid="P98-1043">
  <Title>Alignment of Multiple Languages for Historical Comparison</Title>
  <Section position="7" start_page="278" end_page="279" type="concl">
    <SectionTitle>
8 Results and evaluation
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> The algorithm has been prototyped in LPA Prolog, and Table 2 shows some of the alignments it found. None of these took more than five seconds on a 133-MHz Pentium, and the Prolog program was written for versatility, not speed.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> As comparative linguists know, the alignment that gives the best phonetic fit (by any criterion) is not always the etymologically correct one. This is evident with my algorithm. For 2Admittedly an odd set to compare because of the different depth of branching, but they are cognates and each has four segments.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2">  instance, comparing the Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin words for 'field,' the algorithm finds the correct alignment,  ager-ag-ros null a\]-ras (badness = 365) but then discards it in favor of a seemingly better alignment:  ager-ag-ros null a-\]ras (badness = 345) It doesn't know, of course, that \[g\]:\[\]\] is a phonetically probable correspondence.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="3"> Worse, occasionally the present algorithm doesn't consider the etymologically correct alignment at all because something that looks better has already been found. For example, taking the Avestan, Greek, and Latin words for  The penalties for skips may still be too high here, but the real problem is, of course, that the algorithm is looking for the one best alignment, and that's not what comparative reconstruction needs. Instead, the computer should prune the search tree less eagerly, pursuing any alignment whose badness is, say, no more than 120% of the lowest found so far, and delivering all solutions that are reasonably close to the best one found during the entire procedure. Indeed, the availability of multiple potential alignments is the keystone of Kay's (1964) proposal to implement the Comparative Method, which could not be implemented at the time Kay proposed it because of the lack of an efficient search algorithm. The requisite modification is easily made and I plan to pursue it in subsequent work.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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