In this paper, we explore the use of convolutional networks (ConvNets) for the purpose of cognate identification. We compare our architecture with binary classifiers based on string similarity measures on different language families. Our experiments show that convolutional networks achieve competitive results across concepts and across language families at the task of cognate identification.
We propose a unified neural network architecture and learning algorithm that can be applied to various natural language processing tasks including part-of-speech tagging, chunking, named entity recognition, and semantic role labeling. This versatility is achieved by trying to avoid task-specific engineering and therefore disregarding a lot of prior knowledge. Instead of exploiting man-made input features carefully optimized for each task, our system learns internal representations on the basis of vast amounts of mostly unlabeled training data. This work is then used as a basis for building a freely available tagging system with good performance and minimal computational requirements. A character-based measure of similarity is an important component of many natural language processing systems, including approaches to transliteration, coreference, word alignment, spelling correction, and the identication of cognates in related vocabularies. We propose an alignment-based discriminative framework for string similarity. We gather features from substring pairs consistent with a character-based alignment of the two strings. This approach achieves exceptional performance; on nine separate cognate identication experiments using six language pairs, we more than double the precision of traditional orthographic measures like Longest Common Subsequence Ratio and Dice’s Coefcient. We also show strong improvements over other recent discriminative and heuristic similarity functions.