The concept of a temporal phylogenetic network is a mathematical model of evolution of a family of natural languages. It takes into account the fact that languages can trade their characteristics with each other when linguistic commu- nities are in contact, and also that a contact is only possible when the languages are spoken at the same time. We show how computational methods of answer set programming and constraint logic programming can be used to generate plausible conjectures about contacts between prehistoric linguistic communities, and illus- trate our approach by applying it to the evolutionary history of Indo-European languages. 1 Introduction The evolutionary history of families of natural languages is a major topic of research in historical linguistics. It is also of interest to archaeologists, human geneticists, and physical anthropologists. In this paper we show how this work can benefit from the use of computational methods of logic programming.

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Theory and Practice of Logic Programming, Vol. 6 (2006), pp. 539-558.

@Article{erd06, title={Temporal Phylogenetic Networks and Logic Programming}, author={Esra Erdem and Vladimir Lifschitz and Don Ringe}, volume={6}, journal={Theory and Practice of Logic Programming}, pages={539-558}, url="http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/ai-lab?erd06", year={2006} }