Since the 1950s, linguists have been using short lists (40-200 items) of basic vocabulary as the central component in a methodology which is claimed to make it possible to automatically calculate genetic relationships among languages. In the last few years these methods have experienced something of a revival, in that more languages are involved, different distance measures are systematically compared and evaluated, and methods from computational biology are used for calculating language family

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... trees. In this paper, we explore how this methodology can be extended in another direction, by using larger word lists automatically extracted from a parallel corpus using word alignment software. We present preliminary results from using the Europarl parallel corpus in this way for estimating the distances between some languages in the Indo-European language family.