Measuring cross-language intelligibility between Romance languages with computational tools

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dinu, Liviu P, Uban, Ana Sabina, Iordache, Bogdan, Dinu, Anca, Georgescu, Simona
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Dinu, Liviu P
Uban, Ana Sabina
Iordache, Bogdan
Dinu, Anca
Georgescu, Simona
author_facet Dinu, Liviu P
Uban, Ana Sabina
Iordache, Bogdan
Dinu, Anca
Georgescu, Simona
contents We present an analysis of mutual intelligibility in related languages applied for languages in the Romance family. We introduce a novel computational metric for estimating intelligibility based on lexical similarity using surface and semantic similarity of related words, and use it to measure mutual intelligibility for the five main Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian), and compare results using both the orthographic and phonetic forms of words as well as different parallel corpora and vectorial models of word meaning representation. The obtained intelligibility scores confirm intuitions related to intelligibility asymmetry across languages and significantly correlate with results of cloze tests in human experiments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_07447
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Measuring cross-language intelligibility between Romance languages with computational tools
Dinu, Liviu P
Uban, Ana Sabina
Iordache, Bogdan
Dinu, Anca
Georgescu, Simona
Computation and Language
We present an analysis of mutual intelligibility in related languages applied for languages in the Romance family. We introduce a novel computational metric for estimating intelligibility based on lexical similarity using surface and semantic similarity of related words, and use it to measure mutual intelligibility for the five main Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian), and compare results using both the orthographic and phonetic forms of words as well as different parallel corpora and vectorial models of word meaning representation. The obtained intelligibility scores confirm intuitions related to intelligibility asymmetry across languages and significantly correlate with results of cloze tests in human experiments.
title Measuring cross-language intelligibility between Romance languages with computational tools
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07447