Abstract Computational approaches to historical linguistics have been proposed for half a century. Within the last decade, this line of research has received a major boost, owing both to the transfer of ideas and software from computational biology and to the release of several large electronic data resources suitable for systematic comparative work. In this article, some of the central research topics of this new wave of computational historical linguistics are introduced and discussed. These are automatic assessment of genetic relatedness, automatic cognate detection, phylogenetic inference and ancestral state reconstruction. They will be demonstrated by means of a case study of automatically reconstructing a Proto-Romance word list from lexical data of 50 modern Romance languages and dialects. The results illustrate both the strengths and the weaknesses of the current state of the art of automating the comparative method.

中文翻译：

---

计算历史语言学

摘要历史语言学的计算方法已经提出了半个世纪。在过去的十年中，由于计算生物学的思想和软件的转移以及适用于系统比较工作的几种大型电子数据资源的发布，这一研究领域得到了极大的推动。在本文中，将介绍和讨论这一新的计算历史语言学新潮的一些中心研究主题。这些是遗传相关性的自动评估，自动同源检测，系统发育推断和祖先状态重建。他们将通过一个案例研究进行演示，该案例研究是从50种现代罗曼语和方言的词汇数据中自动重建Pro-Romance单词列表的。