Research Initiative for Computational Analysis of Linguistic Development (CALD)

The Research Initiative for Computational Analysis of Linguistic Development (CALD) at the University of Konstanz brings together researchers from three disciplines:

- Computational Linguistics
- Databases, Data Mining, and Visualization
- Typology & Historical Linguistics.

In recent years a new interdisciplinary field sometimes referred to as “evolutionary dynamics” has increasingly attracted the joint attention of researchers from a variety of established disciplines such as historical linguistics, computer science, evolutionary biology, genetics, anthropology, and archaeology. One of the most interesting and challenging issues out of this field is the evolution of human language which shows to have some similarities with biological evolution but some crucial differences as well.

The amount and complexity of languages as well as their complex relations and interactions make the exploration of language evolution a demanding challenge for research. Computer modelling and visualization of linguistic developments are therefore gaining importance, possibly revealing developmental patterns whose perception would otherwise remain vague and impressionistic or go unrecognized in the sea of detail. Both internal and external history, relating to mental grammars and speech communities respectively, are of interest.

In a joint effort we aim to develop new analytic and visualization techniques for relating the available data on speech-community and grammar/lexicon histories, to measure structural and historical "distances", and to model linguistically realistic developmental scenarios.