Phylogeny reconstruction in linguistics

Languages evolve over time much as biological populations do, and the problems of inferring evolutionary history of
languages also have a great deal in common with the comparable problems in biology. In this talk, I will discuss new
approaches for estimating evolution that we have been developing, and show how these methods work on both real and
simulated data. I will also discuss recent work by other researchers (Gray and Atkinson in particular) for the same problem.
The talk represents work in progress by a collaboration involving Donald Ringe (Linguistics, U Penn),
Luay Nakhleh (Computer Science, Rice), Steve Evans (Math/Stat, Berkeley) and myself.