The Automated Similarity Judgment Program (ASJP) is a collaborative project applying computational approaches to comparative linguistics using a database of word lists.
[2] The database has been used to estimate dates at which language families have diverged into daughter languages by a method related to but still different from glottochronology,[3] to determine the homeland (Urheimat) of a proto-language,[4] to investigate sound symbolism,[5] to evaluate different phylogenetic methods,[6] and several other purposes.
ASJP is not widely accepted among historical linguists as an adequate method to establish or evaluate relationships between language families.
[7] It is part of the Cross-Linguistic Linked Data project hosted by the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.
came to involve around 25 professional linguists and other interested parties working as volunteer transcribers and/or extending aid to the project in other ways.
In papers published since 2008, ASJP has employed a similarity judgment program based on Levenshtein distance (LD).
This approach was found to produce better classificatory results measured against expert opinion than the method used initially.