On the Romance Languages Mutual Intelligibility

Liviu Dinu, Alina Maria Ciobanu


Abstract
We propose a method for computing the similarity of natural languages and for clustering them based on their lexical similarity. Our study provides evidence to be used in the investigation of the written intelligibility, i.e., the ability of people writing in different languages to understand one another without prior knowledge of foreign languages. We account for etymons and cognates, we quantify lexical similarity and we extend our analysis from words to languages. Based on the introduced methodology, we compute a matrix of Romance languages intelligibility.
Anthology ID:
L14-1127
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14)
Month:
May
Year:
2014
Address:
Reykjavik, Iceland
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Hrafn Loftsson, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
3313–3318
Language:
URL:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1183_Paper.pdf
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Liviu Dinu and Alina Maria Ciobanu. 2014. On the Romance Languages Mutual Intelligibility. In Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'14), pages 3313–3318, Reykjavik, Iceland. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
On the Romance Languages Mutual Intelligibility (Dinu & Ciobanu, LREC 2014)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2014/pdf/1183_Paper.pdf