Dataset origin: http://lrec2014.lrec-conf.org/en/shared-lrs/current-list-shared-lrs/

Description

Automatic methods for phonetic alignment play an increasingly important role in quantitative approaches to historical linguistics and dialectology. With the "Benchmark Database for Phonetic Alignments" (BDPA), we present a new data resource which offers collections of cognate words from different language varieties. In contrast to other resources which concentrate on questions of cognacy and lexical change, the BDPA represents the data in form of pairwise and multiple alignments. An alignment is a matrix representation of two or more sequences in which corresponding segments in the sequences are placed in the same column, with empty cells resulting from non-matching segments being filled by gap symbols. Currently, the BDPA offers a total of 750 multiple alignments based on 12 different sources of language and dialect varieties.

Citation

@InProceedings{LIST14.299,
  author = {Johann-Mattis List and Jelena Prokić},
  title = {A Benchmark Database of Phonetic Alignments in Historical Linguistics and Dialectology},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)},
  year = {2014},
  month = {may},
  date = {26-31},
  address = {Reykjavik, Iceland},
  editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Hrafn Loftsson and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis},
  publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)},
  isbn = {978-2-9517408-8-4},
  language = {english}
 }