Sequence Labeling for Cognate Production

Abstract

We propose a sequence labeling approach to cognate production based on the orthography of the words. Our approach leverages the idea that orthographic changes represent sound correspondences to a fairly large extent. Given an input word in language L1, we seek to determine its cognate pair in language L2. To this end, we employ a sequential model which captures the intuition that orthographic changes are highly dependent on the context in which they occur. We apply our method on two pairs of languages. Finally, we investigate how second language learners perceive the orthographic changes from their mother tongue to the language they learn.