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.

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.

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.