Jackknifing the black sheep: ASJP classification performance and Austronesian.
Soren Wichmann
- Osaka-JP : National Museum Ethnology, 2018.
- páginas 39-58: ilustraciones en blanco y negro.
- no. 98 (2018)
- Senri Ethnological Studies ; no. 98 .
- National Museum of Ethnology Osaka. .
The performance of the Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) method of
language classification has been tested quantitatively across the world's language
families, as well as through more detailed, qualitative inspections of ASJP trees,
comparing them with classifications of individual families by experts. Different
quantitative performance evaluations all point to a relatively poor overall performance in
the case of Austronesian. In order to investigate why Austronesian appears to be so
recalcitrant, we identify the individual Austronesian language groups that are responsible
for the discrepancies between ASJP and expert classifications-the 'black sheep' of the
family-using a simple technique called jackknifing. It turns out that many of the
languages which induce a poor fit between the expert and ASJP classifications belong to
subgroups of Austronesian that are problematic in various ways. Thus, inaccuracies in the
experts' classification of Austronesian must, at least partly, be responsible for the added
amount of error in the ASJP classification when it comes to Austronesian.