Preface

 By introducing a new phonetic form alignment method called Information-Weighted Sequence Alignment (IWSA), this book shows that established methods for automated cognacy detection are refinable in such a way that they work on phonetically transcribed dictionary forms, making it unnecessary to manually reduce all words to their stems before running cognate detection on them. The method shows its strength especially in the unusual scenario of cross-family cognate detection, where it does not pay off to assume cognacy of similar forms as much as on the single-family datasets commonly used in the literature on automated cognate detection.