The Laplacian spectrum of language: Experiments with linguistic families from the Americas

• Autor: Vera Zúñiga, Javier
• Formato: artículo
• Fecha de Publicación: 2025
• Institución: Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú
• Repositorio: PUCP-Institucional
• Lenguaje: inglés
• OAI Identifier: oai:repositorio.pucp.edu.pe:20.500.14657/205130
• Enlace del recurso: http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14657/205130; https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/adb450
• Nivel de acceso: acceso abierto
• Materia: Lenguas indígenas--América Latina; Lingüística--Investigaciones; Lingüística--Métodos estadísticos; Lenguaje y lenguas--Estudio y enseñanza; https://purl.org/pe-repo/ocde/ford#2.04.01

To what extent would statistical mechanics approaches help to represent languages from the Americas? Is it possible to extract useful information about the relationships between these languages? This work studies a graph-based approach to extract information from text corpora of languages of the Americas. Each language is viewed as the set of eigenvalues obtained from the Laplacian matrix of co-occurrence graphs. The results suggest that our graph-based feature extraction technique is partly comparable to the knowledge contained in typological databases. We argue that our approach might propose a solution to the lack of textual resources for low-resource Languages.