Measuring cross-language intelligibility between Romance languages with computational tools
Abstract
We present an analysis of mutual intelligibility in related languages applied for languages in the Romance family. We introduce a novel computational metric for estimating intelligibility based on lexical similarity using surface and semantic similarity of related words, and use it to measure mutual intelligibility for the five main Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian), and compare results using both the orthographic and phonetic forms of words as well as different parallel corpora and vectorial models of word meaning representation. The obtained intelligibility scores confirm intuitions related to intelligibility asymmetry across languages and significantly correlate with results of cloze tests in human experiments.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2602.07447,
title = {Measuring cross-language intelligibility between Romance languages with computational tools},
author = {Liviu P Dinu and Ana Sabina Uban and Bogdan Iordache and Anca Dinu and Simona Georgescu},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.07447},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
16 pages, 7 figures, 2 tables