ConLoan: A Contrastive Multilingual Dataset for Evaluating Loanwords

Sina Ahmadi, Micha David Hess, Elena Álvarez-Mellado, Alessia Battisti, Cui Ding, Anne Göhring, Yingqiang Gao, Zifan Jiang, Andrianos Michail, Peshmerge Morad, Joel Niklaus, Maria Christina Panagiotopoulou, Stefano Perrella, Juri Opitz, Anastassia Shaitarova, Rico Sennrich


Abstract
Lexical borrowing, the adoption of words from one language into another, is a ubiquitous linguistic phenomenon influenced by geopolitical, societal, and technological factors. This paper introduces ConLoan–a novel contrastive dataset comprising sentences with and without loanwords across 10 languages. Through systematic evaluation using this dataset, we investigate how state-of-the-art machine translation and language models process loanwords compared to their native alternatives. Our experiments reveal that these systems show systematic preferences for loanwords over native terms and exhibit varying performance across languages. These findings provide valuable insights for developing more linguistically robust NLP systems.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.1453
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
30070–30090
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1453/
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Cite (ACL):
Sina Ahmadi, Micha David Hess, Elena Álvarez-Mellado, Alessia Battisti, Cui Ding, Anne Göhring, Yingqiang Gao, Zifan Jiang, Andrianos Michail, Peshmerge Morad, Joel Niklaus, Maria Christina Panagiotopoulou, Stefano Perrella, Juri Opitz, Anastassia Shaitarova, and Rico Sennrich. 2025. ConLoan: A Contrastive Multilingual Dataset for Evaluating Loanwords. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 30070–30090, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ConLoan: A Contrastive Multilingual Dataset for Evaluating Loanwords (Ahmadi et al., ACL 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1453.pdf