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.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{dinu-etal-2024-pater,
title = "Pater Incertus? There Is a Solution: Automatic Discrimination between Cognates and Borrowings for {R}omance Languages",
author = "Dinu, Liviu P. and
Uban, Ana Sabina and
Iordache, Ioan-Bogdan and
Cristea, Alina Maria and
Georgescu, Simona and
Zoicas, Laurentiu",
editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta and
Kan, Min-Yen and
Hoste, Veronique and
Lenci, Alessandro and
Sakti, Sakriani and
Xue, Nianwen",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
month = may,
year = "2024",
address = "Torino, Italia",
publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1108/",
pages = "12657--12667"
}