Open AccessAutomated identification of borrowings in multilingual wordlists
Author(s) -
JohannMattis List,
Robert Forkel
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
open research europe
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 2732-5121
DOI - 10.12688/openreseurope.13843.2
Subject(s) - identification (biology) , computer science , task (project management) , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , lexical analysis , linguistics , engineering , biology , botany , systems engineering , philosophy
Although lexical borrowing is an important aspect of language evolution, there have been few attempts to automate the identification of borrowings in lexical datasets. Moreover, none of the solutions which have been proposed so far identify borrowings across multiple languages. This study proposes a new method for the task and tests it on a newly compiled large comparative dataset of 48 South-East Asian languages from Southern China. The method yields very promising results, while it is conceptually straightforward and easy to apply. This makes the approach a perfect candidate for computer-assisted exploratory studies on lexical borrowing in contact areas.