  Computational approaches to historical linguistics have been proposed since
half a century. Within the last decade, this line of research has received a
major boost, owing both to the transfer of ideas and software from
computational biology and to the release of several large electronic data
resources suitable for systematic comparative work.
  In this article, some of the central research topic of this new wave of
computational historical linguistics are introduced and discussed. These are
automatic assessment of genetic relatedness, automatic cognate detection,
phylogenetic inference and ancestral state reconstruction. They will be
demonstrated by means of a case study of automatically reconstructing a
Proto-Romance word list from lexical data of 50 modern Romance languages and
dialects.
