Laurentiu Zoicas


2022

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CoToHiLi at LSCDiscovery: the Role of Linguistic Features in Predicting Semantic Change
Ana Sabina Uban | Alina Maria Cristea | Anca Daniela Dinu | Liviu P Dinu | Simona Georgescu | Laurentiu Zoicas
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change

This paper presents the contributions of the CoToHiLi team for the LSCDiscovery shared task on semantic change in the Spanish language. We participated in both tasks (graded discovery and binary change, including sense gain and sense loss) and proposed models based on word embedding distances combined with hand-crafted linguistic features, including polysemy, number of neological synonyms, and relation to cognates in English. We find that models that include linguistically informed features combined using weights assigned manually by experts lead to promising results.

2021

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Towards an Etymological Map of Romanian
Alina Maria Cristea | Anca Dinu | Liviu P. Dinu | Simona Georgescu | Ana Sabina Uban | Laurentiu Zoicas
Proceedings of the International Conference on Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing (RANLP 2021)

In this paper we investigate the etymology of Romanian words. We start from the Romanian lexicon and automatically extract information from multiple etymological dictionaries. We evaluate the results and perform extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses with the goal of building an etymological map of the language.

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Tracking Semantic Change in Cognate Sets for English and Romance Languages
Ana Sabina Uban | Alina Maria Cristea | Anca Dinu | Liviu P. Dinu | Simona Georgescu | Laurentiu Zoicas
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change 2021

Semantic divergence in related languages is a key concern of historical linguistics. We cross-linguistically investigate the semantic divergence of cognate pairs in English and Romance languages, by means of word embeddings. To this end, we introduce a new curated dataset of cognates in all pairs of those languages. We describe the types of errors that occurred during the automated cognate identification process and manually correct them. Additionally, we label the English cognates according to their etymology, separating them into two groups: old borrowings and recent borrowings. On this curated dataset, we analyse word properties such as frequency and polysemy, and the distribution of similarity scores between cognate sets in different languages. We automatically identify different clusters of English cognates, setting a new direction of research in cognates, borrowings and possibly false friends analysis in related languages.

2020

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Automatic Reconstruction of Missing Romanian Cognates and Unattested Latin Words
Alina Maria Ciobanu | Liviu P. Dinu | Laurentiu Zoicas
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

Producing related words is a key concern in historical linguistics. Given an input word, the task is to automatically produce either its proto-word, a cognate pair or a modern word derived from it. In this paper, we apply a method for producing related words based on sequence labeling, aiming to fill in the gaps in incomplete cognate sets in Romance languages with Latin etymology (producing Romanian cognates that are missing) and to reconstruct uncertified Latin words. We further investigate an ensemble-based aggregation for combining and re-ranking the word productions of multiple languages.