Simulating Language Evolution: a Tool for Historical Linguistics

AbstractLanguage change across space and time is one of the main concerns in historical linguistics. In this paper, we develop a language evolution simulator: a web-based tool for word form production to assist in historical linguistics, in studying the evolution of the languages. Given a word in a source language, the system automatically predicts how the word evolves in a target language. The method that we propose is language-agnostic and does not use any external knowledge, except for the training word pairs.