Introduction. Dr. Kessler, of Washington University St. Louis, has done a lot of interesting work. His thesis, Kessler (2001), discussed the statistical techniques that have been applied to multilateral comparison, notably by, for example, Ringe (1992). His work has focused on phonetics, and he is currently with the psychology department.
He might be of particular interest because he earned his B.A., M.S., and M.L.S. at our very own Indiana University Bloomington! However, his Ph.D. was at Stanford.
Links.
http://artsci.wustl.edu/faculty/kessler-brett His homepage.
http://brettkessler.com/ His other homepage, which contains links to his papers. It also contains links to several programs, for example a Java program that demonstrates historical connections between languages and contains the Swadesh lists for 15 languages, and some other things.
Selected Works.
Kessler, Brett : (2007) Word similarity metrics and multilateral comparison, Proceedings of Ninth Meeting of the ACL Special Interest Group in Computational Morphology and Phonology, Pp. 6-14.
Kessler, Brett , Lehtonen, A. : (2006) Multilateral comparison and significance testing of the Indo-Uralic question, P. Forster and C. Renfrew (Eds.), Phylogenetic methods and the prehistory of languages, Pp. 33-42.
- Kessler, B. (2001). The Significance of Word Lists: Statistical Tests for Investigating Historical Connections Between Languages. Stanford, CA: CSLI Publications. Distributed by The University of Chicago Press.
Reference.
Ringe, Donald A.: (1992) On Calculating the Factor of Chance in Language Comparison, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 82, No. 1, Pp. 1-110.