Finally Released Concepticon 1.1 and New Drafts

After two years of hard work on API and data, we have finally managed to release version 1.1 of the Concepticon resource. In addition to the general application, we also offer a standalone app with enhanced search functionalities in currently seven languages, which can be found here.

Furthermore, we just submitted our final version (before the final proofs) of an paper that will appear some time later in 2018 with the provocative title Save the trees: Why we need tree models in historical linguistics (and when we should apply them).

Last not least, a short paper on the question Are automatic methods for cognate detection good enough for phylogenetic reconstruction (Taraka Rama, myself, Johannes Wahle, and Gerhard Jäger) was now accepted as a short paper to be presented in form of a poster at the NAACL conference. We're currently revising the draft, but we will try to put a draft close to the final version soon. The results indicate that especially the simpler methods may perform surprisingly well, although we could, unfortunately, only check the topology.