A Benchmark Database of Phonetic Alignments in Historical Linguistics and Dialectology

In the last two decades, alignment analyses have become an important technique in quantitative historical linguistics and dialectology. Phonetic alignment plays a crucial role in the identification of regular sound correspondences and deeper genealogical relations between and within languages and language families. Surprisingly, up to today, there are no easily accessible benchmark data sets for phonetic alignment analyses. Here we present a publicly available database of manually edited phonetic alignments which can serve as a platform for testing and improving the performance of automatic alignment algorithms. The database consists of a great variety of alignments drawn from a large number of different sources. The data is arranged in a such way that typical problems encountered in phonetic alignment analyses (metathesis, diversity of phonetic sequences) are represented and can be directly tested.