Using global constraints and reranking to improve cognates detection

Abstract

Global constraints and reranking have not been used in cognates detection research to date. We propose methods for using global constraints by performing rescoring of the score matrices produced by state of the art cognates detection systems. Using global constraints to perform rescoring is complementary to state of the art methods for performing cognates detection and results in significant performance improvements beyond current state of the art performance on publicly available datasets with different language pairs and various conditions such as different levels of baseline state of the art performance and different data size conditions, including with more realistic large data size conditions than have been evaluated with in the past.