This work presents a new resource for borrowing identification and analyzes the performance and errors of several models on this task. We introduce a new annotated corpus of Spanish newswire rich in unassimilated lexical borrowings -- words from one language that are introduced into another without orthographic adaptation -- and use it to evaluate how several sequence labeling models (CRF, BiLSTM-CRF, and Transformer-based models) perform. The corpus contains 370,000 tokens and is larger, more borrowing-dense, OOV-rich, and topic-varied than previous corpora available for this task. Our results show that a BiLSTM-CRF model fed with subword embeddings along with either Transformer-based embeddings pretrained on codeswitched data or a combination of contextualized word embeddings outperforms results obtained by a multilingual BERT-based model.
@article{arxiv.2203.16169,
title = {Detecting Unassimilated Borrowings in Spanish: An Annotated Corpus and Approaches to Modeling},
author = {Elena Álvarez-Mellado and Constantine Lignos},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2203.16169},
year = {2022}
}