Inferring phylogenetic graphs of natural languages using minimum message length

We extend phylogenetic (or evolutionary) trees to phylogenetic graphs. Unlike phylogenetic trees, phylogenetic graphs are capable of modelling evolution where a child node inherits from more than one parent node. Minimum Message Length (MML)(Wallace and Boulton 1968; Wallace 2005) is an inductive inference method that measures the goodness of a model. We use MML to infer phylogenetic graphs (including mutation probabilities along arcs). We introduce the use of MML to infer phylogenetic graphs for artificial languages as well as for some European languages (English, French and Spanish). Our modelling assumes only copy and change operations on characters, and is based on words which have the same length in all natural languages considered.

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