Related papers: Measuring cross-language intelligibility between R…
Meaning is the foundation stone of intercultural communication. Languages are continuously changing, and words shift their meanings for various reasons. Semantic divergence in related languages is a key concern of historical linguistics. In…
Two languages are considered mutually intelligible if their native speakers can communicate with each other, while using their own mother tongue. How does the fact that humans perceive a language pair as mutually intelligible affect the…
Closely related languages show linguistic similarities that allow speakers of one language to understand speakers of another language without having actively learned it. Mutual intelligibility varies in degree and is typically tested in…
We generalize the word analogy task across languages, to provide a new intrinsic evaluation method for cross-lingual semantic spaces. We experiment with six languages within different language families, including English, German, Spanish,…
Understanding how styles differ across languages is advantageous for training both humans and computers to generate culturally appropriate text. We introduce an explanation framework to extract stylistic differences from multilingual LMs…
Lexical semantic typology has identified important cross-linguistic generalizations about the variation and commonalities in polysemy patterns---how languages package up meanings into words. Recent computational research has enabled…
This paper experiments with frequency-based corpus similarity measures across 39 languages using a register prediction task. The goal is to quantify (i) the distance between different corpora from the same language and (ii) the homogeneity…
Language models (LMs) show state of the art performance for common sense (CS) question answering, but whether this ability implies a human-level mastery of CS remains an open question. Understanding the limitations and strengths of LMs can…
We present a large-scale comparative study of 242 Latin and Cyrillic-script languages using subword-based methodologies. By constructing 'glottosets' from Wikipedia lexicons, we introduce a framework for simultaneous cross-linguistic…
NLP research on aligning lexical representation spaces to one another has so far focused on aligning language spaces in their entirety. However, cognitive science has long focused on a local perspective, investigating whether translation…
This paper proposes to use distributed representation of words (word embeddings) in cross-language textual similarity detection. The main contributions of this paper are the following: (a) we introduce new cross-language similarity…
The words of a language are randomly replaced in time by new ones, but it has long been known that words corresponding to some items (meanings) are less frequently replaced than others. Usually, the rate of replacement for a given item is…
Computational approaches to historical linguistics have been proposed since half a century. Within the last decade, this line of research has received a major boost, owing both to the transfer of ideas and software from computational…
This work addresses the problem of measuring how many languages a person "effectively" speaks given that some of the languages are close to each other. In other words, to assign a meaningful number to her language portfolio. Intuition says…
Large language models (LLMs) provide detailed and impressive responses to queries in English. However, are they really consistent at responding to the same query in other languages? The popular way of evaluating for multilingual performance…
Multilingual Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit remarkable cross-lingual abilities, yet often exhibit a systematic bias toward the representations from other languages, resulting in semantic interference when generating content in…
The ability to compare the semantic similarity between text corpora is important in a variety of natural language processing applications. However, standard methods for evaluating these metrics have yet to be established. We propose a set…
Part-of-speech (POS) tagging for Medieval Romance languages remains challenging due to orthographic variation, morphological complexity, and limited annotated resources. This paper presents a systematic empirical evaluation of large…
Orthographic transparency -- how directly spelling is related to sound -- lacks a unified, script-agnostic metric. Using ideas from algorithmic information theory, we quantify orthographic transparency in terms of the mutual compressibility…
In this work, we present an extensive study of statistical machine translation involving languages of the Indian subcontinent. These languages are related by genetic and contact relationships. We describe the similarities between Indic…