  In this paper, we describe the problem of cognate identification and its
relation to phylogenetic inference. We introduce subsequence based features for
discriminating cognates from non-cognates. We show that subsequence based
features perform better than the state-of-the-art string similarity measures
for the purpose of cognate identification. We use the cognate judgments for the
purpose of phylogenetic inference and observe that these classifiers infer a
tree which is close to the gold standard tree. The contribution of this paper
is the use of subsequence features for cognate identification and to employ the
cognate judgments for phylogenetic inference.
