Abstract
Language contact is a pervasive phenomenon reflected in the borrowing of words from donor to recipient languages. Most computational approaches to borrowing detection treat all languages under study as equally important, even though dominant languages have a stronger impact on heritage languages than vice versa. We test new methods for lexical borrowing detection in contact situations where dominant languages play an important role, applying two classical sequence comparison methods and one machine learning method to a sample of seven Latin American languages which have all borrowed extensively from Spanish. All systems perform well, with the supervised machine learning system outperforming the classical systems. A review of detection errors shows that borrowing detection could be substantially improved by taking into account donor words with divergent meanings from recipient words.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.eacl-main.190
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Dubrovnik, Croatia
- Editors:
- Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
- Venue:
- EACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2599–2605
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.190
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.190
- Cite (ACL):
- John E. Miller and Johann-Mattis List. 2023. Detecting Lexical Borrowings from Dominant Languages in Multilingual Wordlists. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2599–2605, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Detecting Lexical Borrowings from Dominant Languages in Multilingual Wordlists (Miller & List, EACL 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/revert-3132-ingestion-checklist/2023.eacl-main.190.pdf