calclab.org
Computer-Assisted Language Comparison
Our group develops computer-assisted frameworks for historical linguistics and linguistic typology and thus contributes to multilingual approaches in computational linguistics. We apply the methods too address key questions in historical linguistics, linguistic typology, and human cognition. We pursue an interdisciplinary approach that adapts methods from computer science and bioinformatics for the use in computational linguistics. While purely computational approaches are common today, our research focuses on the communication between classical and computational linguists, developing interfaces that allow comparative linguists to produce their data in machine readable formats while at the same time presenting the results of computational analyses in a transparent and human-readable way. The group started as the CALC (Computer-Assisted Language Comparison) Lab at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena (later Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig). From 2023 on, the CALC Lab is represented by the Chair of Multilingual Computational Linguistics (MCL) at the University of Passau.
