Identifying Cognates in English-Dutch and French-Dutch by means of Orthographic Information and Cross-lingual Word Embeddings

Els Lefever, Sofie Labat, Pranaydeep Singh


Abstract
This paper investigates the validity of combining more traditional orthographic information with cross-lingual word embeddings to identify cognate pairs in English-Dutch and French-Dutch. In a first step, lists of potential cognate pairs in English-Dutch and French-Dutch are manually labelled. The resulting gold standard is used to train and evaluate a multi-layer perceptron that can distinguish cognates from non-cognates. Fifteen orthographic features capture string similarities between source and target words, while the cosine similarity between their word embeddings represents the semantic relation between these words. By adding domain-specific information to pretrained fastText embeddings, we are able to obtain good embeddings for words that did not yet have a pretrained embedding (e.g. Dutch compound nouns). These embeddings are then aligned in a cross-lingual vector space by exploiting their structural similarity (cf. adversarial learning). Our results indicate that although the classifier already achieves good results on the basis of orthographic information, the performance further improves by including semantic information in the form of cross-lingual word embeddings.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.504
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:
4096–4101
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.504
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Els Lefever, Sofie Labat, and Pranaydeep Singh. 2020. Identifying Cognates in English-Dutch and French-Dutch by means of Orthographic Information and Cross-lingual Word Embeddings. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 4096–4101, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Identifying Cognates in English-Dutch and French-Dutch by means of Orthographic Information and Cross-lingual Word Embeddings (Lefever et al., LREC 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.504.pdf