Automatically Building a Multilingual Lexicon of False Friends With No Supervision

Ana Sabina Uban, Liviu P. Dinu

Abstract
Cognate words, defined as words in different languages which derive from a common etymon, can be useful for language learners, who can leverage the orthographical similarity of cognates to more easily understand a text in a foreign language. Deceptive cognates, or false friends, do not share the same meaning anymore; these can be instead deceiving and detrimental for language acquisition or text understanding in a foreign language. We use an automatic method of detecting false friends from a set of cognates, in a fully unsupervised fashion, based on cross-lingual word embeddings. We implement our method for English and five Romance languages, including a low-resource language (Romanian), and evaluate it against two different gold standards. The method can be extended easily to any language pair, requiring only large monolingual corpora for the involved languages and a small bilingual dictionary for the pair. We additionally propose a measure of “falseness” of a false friends pair. We publish freely the database of false friends in the six languages, along with the falseness scores for each cognate pair. The resource is the largest of the kind that we are aware of, both in terms of languages covered and number of word pairs.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.367
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
3001–3007
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.367
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ana Sabina Uban and Liviu P. Dinu. 2020. Automatically Building a Multilingual Lexicon of False Friends With No Supervision. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 3001–3007, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Automatically Building a Multilingual Lexicon of False Friends With No Supervision (Uban & Dinu, LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-1/2020.lrec-1.367.pdf
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