Pater Incertus? There Is a Solution: Automatic Discrimination between Cognates and Borrowings for Romance Languages

Liviu P. Dinu, Ana Sabina Uban, Ioan-Bogdan Iordache, Alina Maria Cristea, Simona Georgescu, Laurentiu Zoicas


Abstract
Identifying the type of relationship between words (cognates, borrowings, inherited) provides a deeper insight into the history of a language and allows for a better characterization of language relatedness. In this paper, we propose a computational approach for discriminating between cognates and borrowings, one of the most difficult tasks in historical linguistics. We compare the discriminative power of graphic and phonetic features and we analyze the underlying linguistic factors that prove relevant in the classification task. We perform experiments for pairs of languages in the Romance language family (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian), based on a comprehensive database of Romance cognates and borrowings. To our knowledge, this is one of the first attempts of this kind and the most comprehensive in terms of covered languages.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.1108
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
12657–12667
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1108
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Liviu P. Dinu, Ana Sabina Uban, Ioan-Bogdan Iordache, Alina Maria Cristea, Simona Georgescu, and Laurentiu Zoicas. 2024. Pater Incertus? There Is a Solution: Automatic Discrimination between Cognates and Borrowings for Romance Languages. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 12657–12667, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Pater Incertus? There Is a Solution: Automatic Discrimination between Cognates and Borrowings for Romance Languages (Dinu et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1108.pdf
Optional supplementary material:
 2024.lrec-main.1108.OptionalSupplementaryMaterial.zip