自监督词汇表示学习实现快速大规模系统发育推断

Computer Science > Computation and Language arXiv:2609.05262v1 (cs) [Submitted on 4 Sep 2026] Title:Self-Supervised Lexical Representation Learning for Fast, Large-Scale Phylogenetic Inference Authors:Tim Wientzek View a PDF of the paper titled Self-Supervised Lexical Representation Learning for Fast, Large-Scale Phylogenetic Inference, by Tim Wientzek View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:Computational phylogenetics has become an essential tool in historical linguistics, yet its application at a global scale remains constrained by two factors: the labor-intensive manual annotation of cognacy judgments required for character-based methods and the substantial computational cost of inference on large datasets. This paper introduces a fully self-supervised contrastive learning framework that learns lexical representations directly from raw IPA-transcribed wordlists, without requiring cognacy annotations, alignments, or additional expert input. The model employs a dual contrastive objective: a word-level loss that organizes phonetically similar forms into a coherent space, and an auxiliary language-level loss that encourages the lexical space to reflect broader phonological properties of languages. From the resulting word representations, pairwise language distances are derived and used to infer a global phylogenetic tree of 3,399 language varieties. The inferred tree achieves a generalized quartet distance (GQD) to the Glottolog reference tree competitive with multiple baselines, while requiring only minutes of computation on a standard notebook GPU. Furthermore, the same representations capture diachronic concept stability: variance in pairwise distances across languages yields stability rankings that correlate significantly with established rankings. Ablation studies confirm that both the language-level objective and the use of phonetic feature vectors improved the inferred trees topology with regards to GQD. The framework thus provides a computationally efficient and fully automatic alternative for large-scale phylogenetic inference and offers a unified representation supporting downstream analyses at both the language and concept level. Comments: Subjects: Computation and Language (cs.CL) ACM classes: I.2.7; J.5; I.5.0 Cite as: arXiv:2609.05262 [cs.CL] (or arXiv:2609.05262v1 [cs.CL] for this version) https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.05262 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration) Submission history From: Tim Wientzek-Paul [view email] [v1] Fri, 4 Sep 2026 15:23:12 UTC (10,239 KB) Full-text links: Access Paper: View a PDF of the paper titled Self-Supervised Lexical Representation Learning for Fast, Large-Scale Phylogenetic Inference, by Tim Wientzek View PDF HTML (experimental) TeX Source view license Current browse context: cs.CL new | recent | 2026-09 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar export BibTeX citation Loading... BibTeX formatted citation × loading... Data provided by: Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article alphaXiv Toggle alphaXiv (What is alphaXiv?) Links to Code Toggle CatalyzeX Code Finder for Papers (What is CatalyzeX?) DagsHub Toggle DagsHub (What is DagsHub?) GotitPub Toggle Gotit.pub (What is GotitPub?) Huggingface Toggle Hugging Face (What is Huggingface?) ScienceCast Toggle ScienceCast (What is ScienceCast?) Demos Demos Replicate Toggle Replicate (What is Replicate?) Spaces Toggle Hugging Face Spaces (What is Spaces?) Spaces Toggle TXYZ.AI (What is TXYZ.AI?) Related Papers Recommenders and Search Tools Link to Influence Flower Influence Flower (What are Influence Flowers?) Core recommender toggle CORE Recommender (What is CORE?) Author Venue Institution Topic About arXivLabs arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website. Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them. Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs. Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)