Discovering Lexical Similarity Through Articulatory Feature-based Phonetic Edit Distance
This method helps linguists uncover genetic relationships and loan-words across languages with script differences, but it is incremental as it builds on existing edit distance techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of measuring lexical similarity between languages by proposing a Phonetic Edit Distance method that uses articulatory features, achieving edit distances of 0.82 for German-Persian and 0.93 for Hebrew-Arabic word pairs.
Lexical Similarity (LS) between two languages uncovers many interesting linguistic insights such as genetic relationship, mutual intelligibility, and the usage of one's vocabulary into other. There are various methods through which LS is evaluated. In the same regard, this paper presents a method of Phonetic Edit Distance (PED) that uses a soft comparison of letters using the articulatory features associated with them. The system converts the words into the corresponding International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), followed by the conversion of IPA into its set of articulatory features. Later, the lists of the set of articulatory features are compared using the proposed method. As an example, PED gives edit distance of German word vater and Persian word pidar as 0.82; and similarly, Hebrew word shalom and Arabic word salaam as 0.93, whereas for a juxtapose comparison, their IPA based edit distances are 4 and 2 respectively. Experiments are performed with six languages (Arabic, Hindi, Marathi, Persian, Sanskrit, and Urdu). In this regard, we extracted part of speech wise word-lists from the Universal Dependency corpora and evaluated the LS for every pair of language. Thus, with the proposed approach, we find the genetic affinity, similarity, and borrowing/loan-words despite having script differences and sound variation phenomena among these languages.