@inproceedings{tikhonov-etal-2025-smotrom,
    title = "Smotrom tvoja p{\r{a}} ander drogoj verden! Resurrecting Dead Pidgin with Generative Models: Russenorsk Case Study",
    author = "Tikhonov, Alexey  and
      Shteiner, Sergei  and
      Bykova, Anna  and
      Yamshchikov, Ivan P.",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.934/",
    pages = "18156--18166",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5",
    abstract = "Russenorsk, a pidgin language historically used in trade interactions between Russian and Norwegian speakers, represents a unique linguistic phenomenon. In this paper, we attempt to analyze its lexicon using modern large language models (LLMs), based on surviving literary sources. We construct a structured dictionary of the language, grouped by synonyms and word origins. Subsequently, we use this dictionary to formulate hypotheses about the core principles of word formation and grammatical structure in Russenorsk and show which hypotheses generated by large language models correspond to the hypotheses previously proposed ones in the academic literature. We also develop a ``reconstruction'' translation agent that generates hypothetical Russenorsk renderings of contemporary Russian and Norwegian texts."
}