The Heuristics AI (HAI) is a tool that helps users to find cognates across languages quickly. Lexical comparisons require time, especially for cases were the root word has undergone many sound changes.

Here is an example on how HAI works

Assume that you're looking for cognates to the English word "water". This is what happens:

1. The AI will search for all words in the same language family (in this case Indo-European) that mean "water" or similar e.g. "river".
    
2. Once it has collected all possible cognates, it will compare them doing a phonetic alignment. Some examples:
    

   English	|	w	a	t	-	e	r	|
   German	|	w	a	s	s	e	r	|

   
    

   English	|	w	a	t	e	r	|
   Greek	|	u	<	d	o	r	|

The alignment will return a score depending on the probability of a phoneme shifting to another e.g. b to p, k to g etc.

Disclaimer

Remember this is an experimental tool. It will not do the job of a linguist. Any results need to be verified manually. We're aware that some results might be irrelevant, but we're working on eliminating those by time.