@inproceedings{dinu-etal-2024-pater,
    title = "Pater Incertus? There Is a Solution: Automatic Discrimination between Cognates and Borrowings for {R}omance Languages",
    author = "Dinu, Liviu P.  and
      Uban, Ana Sabina  and
      Iordache, Ioan-Bogdan  and
      Cristea, Alina Maria  and
      Georgescu, Simona  and
      Zoicas, Laurentiu",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Kan, Min-Yen  and
      Hoste, Veronique  and
      Lenci, Alessandro  and
      Sakti, Sakriani  and
      Xue, Nianwen",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)",
    month = may,
    year = "2024",
    address = "Torino, Italia",
    publisher = "ELRA and ICCL",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1108",
    pages = "12657--12667",
    abstract = "Identifying the type of relationship between words (cognates, borrowings, inherited) provides a deeper insight into the history of a language and allows for a better characterization of language relatedness. In this paper, we propose a computational approach for discriminating between cognates and borrowings, one of the most difficult tasks in historical linguistics. We compare the discriminative power of graphic and phonetic features and we analyze the underlying linguistic factors that prove relevant in the classification task. We perform experiments for pairs of languages in the Romance language family (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian), based on a comprehensive database of Romance cognates and borrowings. To our knowledge, this is one of the first attempts of this kind and the most comprehensive in terms of covered languages.",
}

Identifying the type of relationship between words (cognates, borrowings, inherited) provides a deeper insight into the history of a language and allows for a better characterization of language relatedness. In this paper, we propose a computational approach for discriminating between cognates and borrowings, one of the most difficult tasks in historical linguistics. We compare the discriminative power of graphic and phonetic features and we analyze the underlying linguistic factors that prove relevant in the classification task. We perform experiments for pairs of languages in the Romance language family (French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Romanian), based on a comprehensive database of Romance cognates and borrowings. To our knowledge, this is one of the first attempts of this kind and the most comprehensive in terms of covered languages.
Dinu, Liviu P. Uban, Ana Sabina Iordache, Ioan-Bogdan Cristea, Alina Maria Georgescu, Simona Zoicas, Laurentiu
Pater Incertus? There Is a Solution: Automatic Discrimination between Cognates and Borrowings for Romance Languages