Word Etymology as Native Language Interference

Vivi Nastase, Carlo Strapparava


Abstract
We present experiments that show the influence of native language on lexical choice when producing text in another language – in this particular case English. We start from the premise that non-native English speakers will choose lexical items that are close to words in their native language. This leads us to an etymology-based representation of documents written by people whose mother tongue is an Indo-European language. Based on this representation we grow a language family tree, that matches closely the Indo-European language tree.
Anthology ID:
D17-1286
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
September
Year:
2017
Address:
Copenhagen, Denmark
Editors:
Martha Palmer, Rebecca Hwa, Sebastian Riedel
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2702–2707
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1286
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D17-1286
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Vivi Nastase and Carlo Strapparava. 2017. Word Etymology as Native Language Interference. In Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2702–2707, Copenhagen, Denmark. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Word Etymology as Native Language Interference (Nastase & Strapparava, EMNLP 2017)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D17-1286.pdf