Rank Distance with Applications in Similarity of Natural Languages

Issue title: Contagious Creativity – In Honor of the 80th Birthday of Professor Solomon Marcus

Article type: Research Article

Authors: Dinu, Liviu P.

Affiliations: Bucharest University, Faculty of Mathematics, Academiei 14, RO-70109, Bucharest, Romania. ldinu@funinf.cs.unibuc.ro

Abstract: In this paper we introduce a metric for measuring the similarity between two classifications which differ by their constitutive elements. Our measure is inspired from natural language and genomics where the most important information is carried by the first part of the unit. We extend the measure to words and to rooted (un)labelled general trees. We use this metric to analyze the syllabic similarity of Romance languages.

Keywords: Rank distance, similarities, tree-to-tree distance, computing with words, classifications, similarity of Romance languages

Journal: Fundamenta Informaticae, vol. 64, no. 1-4, pp. 135-149, 2005