@inproceedings{nieder-list-2024-computational,
    title = "A Computational Model for the Assessment of Mutual Intelligibility Among Closely Related Languages",
    author = "Nieder, Jessica  and
      List, Johann-Mattis",
    editor = "Hahn, Michael  and
      Sorokin, Alexey  and
      Kumar, Ritesh  and
      Shcherbakov, Andreas  and
      Otmakhova, Yulia  and
      Yang, Jinrui  and
      Serikov, Oleg  and
      Rani, Priya  and
      Ponti, Edoardo M.  and
      Murado{\u{g}}lu, Saliha  and
      Gao, Rena  and
      Cotterell, Ryan  and
      Vylomova, Ekaterina",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP",
    month = mar,
    year = "2024",
    address = "St. Julian's, Malta",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/Add-Cong-Liu-Florida-Atlantic-University-author-id/2024.sigtyp-1.4/",
    pages = "37--43",
    abstract = "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 psycholinguistic experiments. To study mutual intelligibility computationally, we propose a computer-assisted method using the Linear Discriminative Learner, a computational model developed to approximate the cognitive processes by which humans learn languages, which we expand with multilingual semantic vectors and multilingual sound classes. We test the model on cognate data from German, Dutch, and English, three closely related Germanic languages. We find that our model`s comprehension accuracy depends on 1) the automatic trimming of inflections and 2) the language pair for which comprehension is tested. Our multilingual modelling approach does not only offer new methodological findings for automatic testing of mutual intelligibility across languages but also extends the use of Linear Discriminative Learning to multilingual settings."
}