A tool for detecting French-English cognates and false friends

Oana Frunza, Diana Inkpen


Abstract
Cognates are pairs of words in different languages similar in spelling and meaning. They can help a second-language learner on the tasks of vocabulary expansion and reading comprehension. False friends are pairs of words that have similar spelling but different meanings. Partial cognates are pairs of words in two languages that have the same meaning in some, but not all contexts. In this article we present a method to automatically classify a pair of words as cognates or false friends, by using several measures of orthographic similarity as features for classification. We use this method to create complete lists of cognates and false friends between two languages. We also disambiguate partial cognates in context. We applied all our methods to French and English, but they can be applied to other pairs of languages as well. We built a tool that takes the produced lists and annotates a French text with equivalent English cognates or false friends, in order to help second-language learners improve their reading comprehension skills and retention rate.
Anthology ID:
2007.jeptalnrecital-long.8
Volume:
Actes de la 14ème conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles. Articles longs
Month:
June
Year:
2007
Address:
Toulouse, France
Venue:
JEP/TALN/RECITAL
SIG:
Publisher:
ATALA
Note:
Pages:
85–94
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2007.jeptalnrecital-long.8
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Oana Frunza and Diana Inkpen. 2007. A tool for detecting French-English cognates and false friends. In Actes de la 14ème conférence sur le Traitement Automatique des Langues Naturelles. Articles longs, pages 85–94, Toulouse, France. ATALA.
Cite (Informal):
A tool for detecting French-English cognates and false friends (Frunza & Inkpen, JEP/TALN/RECITAL 2007)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/update-css-js/2007.jeptalnrecital-long.8.pdf