A Computational Model for the Assessment of Mutual Intelligibility Among Closely Related Languages

Jessica Nieder, Johann-Mattis List


Abstract
Closely related languages show linguistic similarities that allow speakers of one language to understand speakers of another language without having actively learned it. Mutual intelligibility varies in degree and is typically tested in psycholinguistic experiments. To study mutual intelligibility computationally, we propose a computer-assisted method using the Linear Discriminative Learner, a computational model developed to approximate the cognitive processes by which humans learn languages, which we expand with multilingual semantic vectors and multilingual sound classes. We test the model on cognate data from German, Dutch, and English, three closely related Germanic languages. We find that our model’s comprehension accuracy depends on 1) the automatic trimming of inflections and 2) the language pair for which comprehension is tested. Our multilingual modelling approach does not only offer new methodological findings for automatic testing of mutual intelligibility across languages but also extends the use of Linear Discriminative Learning to multilingual settings.
Anthology ID:
2024.sigtyp-1.4
Volume:
Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP
Month:
March
Year:
2024
Address:
St. Julian's, Malta
Editors:
Michael Hahn, Alexey Sorokin, Ritesh Kumar, Andreas Shcherbakov, Yulia Otmakhova, Jinrui Yang, Oleg Serikov, Priya Rani, Edoardo M. Ponti, Saliha Muradoğlu, Rena Gao, Ryan Cotterell, Ekaterina Vylomova
Venues:
SIGTYP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
37–43
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigtyp-1.4
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jessica Nieder and Johann-Mattis List. 2024. A Computational Model for the Assessment of Mutual Intelligibility Among Closely Related Languages. In Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP, pages 37–43, St. Julian's, Malta. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Computational Model for the Assessment of Mutual Intelligibility Among Closely Related Languages (Nieder & List, SIGTYP-WS 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.sigtyp-1.4.pdf