Orthographic and Morphological Correspondences between Related Slavic Languages as a Base for Modeling of Mutual Intelligibility

Andrea Fischer, Klára Jágrová, Irina Stenger, Tania Avgustinova, Dietrich Klakow, Roland Marti


Abstract
In an intercomprehension scenario, typically a native speaker of language L1 is confronted with output from an unknown, but related language L2. In this setting, the degree to which the receiver recognizes the unfamiliar words greatly determines communicative success. Despite exhibiting great string-level differences, cognates may be recognized very successfully if the receiver is aware of regular correspondences which allow to transform the unknown word into its familiar form. Modeling L1-L2 intercomprehension then requires the identification of all the regular correspondences between languages L1 and L2. We here present a set of linguistic orthographic correspondences manually compiled from comparative linguistics literature along with a set of statistically-inferred suggestions for correspondence rules. In order to do statistical inference, we followed the Minimum Description Length principle, which proposes to choose those rules which are most effective at describing the data. Our statistical model was able to reproduce most of our linguistic correspondences (88.5% for Czech-Polish and 75.7% for Bulgarian-Russian) and furthermore allowed to easily identify many more non-trivial correspondences which also cover aspects of morphology.
Anthology ID:
L16-1665
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
4202–4209
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1665
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Andrea Fischer, Klára Jágrová, Irina Stenger, Tania Avgustinova, Dietrich Klakow, and Roland Marti. 2016. Orthographic and Morphological Correspondences between Related Slavic Languages as a Base for Modeling of Mutual Intelligibility. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 4202–4209, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Orthographic and Morphological Correspondences between Related Slavic Languages as a Base for Modeling of Mutual Intelligibility (Fischer et al., LREC 2016)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1665.pdf