Cross-Linguistic Processing of Non-Compositional Expressions in Slavic Languages
Iuliia Zaitova, Irina Stenger, Muhammad Umer Butt, Tania Avgustinova
Abstract
This study focuses on evaluating and predicting the intelligibility of non-compositional expressions within the context of five closely related Slavic languages: Belarusian, Bulgarian, Czech, Polish, and Ukrainian, as perceived by native speakers of Russian. Our investigation employs a web-based experiment where native Russian respondents take part in free-response and multiple-choice translation tasks. Based on the previous studies in mutual intelligibility and non-compositionality, we propose two predictive factors for reading comprehension of unknown but closely related languages: 1) linguistic distances, which include orthographic and phonological distances; 2) surprisal scores obtained from monolingual Language Models (LMs). Our primary objective is to explore the relationship of these two factors with the intelligibility scores and response times of our web-based experiment. Our findings reveal that, while intelligibility scores from the experimental tasks exhibit a stronger correlation with phonological distances, LM surprisal scores appear to be better predictors of the time participants invest in completing the translation tasks.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.cogalex-1.10
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon @ LREC-COLING 2024
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Michael Zock, Emmanuele Chersoni, Yu-Yin Hsu, Simon de Deyne
- Venue:
- CogALex
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 86–97
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.cogalex-1.10
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Iuliia Zaitova, Irina Stenger, Muhammad Umer Butt, and Tania Avgustinova. 2024. Cross-Linguistic Processing of Non-Compositional Expressions in Slavic Languages. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Cognitive Aspects of the Lexicon @ LREC-COLING 2024, pages 86–97, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- Cross-Linguistic Processing of Non-Compositional Expressions in Slavic Languages (Zaitova et al., CogALex 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.cogalex-1.10.pdf