Automatic Discrimination between Cognates and Borrowings

Identifying the type of relationship between words provides a deeper insight into the history of a language and allows a better characterization of language relatedness. In this paper, we propose a computational approach for discriminating between cognates and borrowings. We show that orthographic features have discriminative power and we analyze the underlying linguistic factors that prove relevant in the classification task. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt of this kind.

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