A New Algorithm for the Alignment of Phonetic Sequences

Alignment of phonetic sequences is a necessary step in many applications in computational phonology. After discussing various approaches to phonetic alignment, I present a new algorithm that combines a number of techniques developed for sequence comparison with a scoring scheme for computing phonetic similarity on the basis of multivalued features. The algorithm performs better on cognate alignment, in terms of accuracy and efficiency, than other algorithms reported in the literature.

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