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.
@InProceedings{FISCHER16.1013,
author = {Andrea Fischer and Klara Jagrova and Irina Stenger and Tania Avgustinova and Dietrich Klakow and Roland Marti}, title = {Orthographic and Morphological Correspondences between Related Slavic Languages as a Base for Modeling of Mutual Intelligibility}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)}, year = {2016}, month = {may}, date = {23-28}, location = {Portorož, Slovenia}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Marko Grobelnik and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Helene Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-9-1}, language = {english} }
Summary of the paper