  We introduce a new measure of distance between languages based on word
embedding, called word embedding language divergence (WELD). WELD is defined as
divergence between unified similarity distribution of words between languages.
Using such a measure, we perform language comparison for fifty natural
languages and twelve genetic languages. Our natural language dataset is a
collection of sentence-aligned parallel corpora from bible translations for
fifty languages spanning a variety of language families. Although we use
parallel corpora, which guarantees having the same content in all languages,
interestingly in many cases languages within the same family cluster together.
In addition to natural languages, we perform language comparison for the coding
regions in the genomes of 12 different organisms (4 plants, 6 animals, and two
human subjects). Our result confirms a significant high-level difference in the
genetic language model of humans/animals versus plants. The proposed method is
a step toward defining a quantitative measure of similarity between languages,
with applications in languages classification, genre identification, dialect
identification, and evaluation of translations.
