A Joint Detection Framework for Latvian Loanwords and Calques Using Monolingual Data

Yelingyun Zhang, Atis Kapenieks, Marina Platonova


Abstract
Lexical borrowing is pervasive across languages with extensive cultural contact, yet its automatic detection remains challenging for low-resource languages, especially regarding calques. Existing methods depend heavily on bilingual resources and focus almost exclusively on phonological loanwords, leaving structural borrowing phenomena like calques largely unaddressed by automated tools. This paper proposes a novel joint binary classification pipeline based solely on monolingual data and mBERT, introducing the first large-scale annotated Latvian borrowing dataset with over 3,000 manually labeled entries across three categories: loanwords, calques, and local words. The pipeline adopts a staged decision process grounded in language contact theory, separating surface-level loanwords before tackling the more ambiguous calque category. Experiments demonstrate that our semi-supervised strategy with pseudo-labeling achieves a macro-F1 of 0.854 on an external test set, outperforming both a direct three-way classifier and a GPT-4o zero-shot baseline. These results establish a performance benchmark for the previously unaddressed task of automatic borrowing detection in Latvian, providing empirical tools for borrowing detection in resource-scarce contexts.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.798
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
10157–10167
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-798
DOI:
10.63317/2f6e35y4dgkn
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yelingyun Zhang, Atis Kapenieks, and Marina Platonova. 2026. A Joint Detection Framework for Latvian Loanwords and Calques Using Monolingual Data. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 10157–10167, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
A Joint Detection Framework for Latvian Loanwords and Calques Using Monolingual Data (Zhang et al., LREC 2026)
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