Native Language Cognate Effects on Second Language Lexical Choice

By Ella Rabinovich, Yulia Tsvetkov, Shuly Wintner. 2018

43 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a computational analysis of cognate effects on the spontaneous linguistic productions of advanced non-native speakers. Introducing a large corpus of highly competent non-native English speakers, and using a set of carefully selected lexical items, we show that the lexical choices of non-natives are affected by cognates in their native language. This effect is so powerful that we are able to reconstruct the phylogenetic language tree of the Indo-European language family solely from the frequencies of specific lexical items in the English of authors with various native languages. We quantitatively analyze non-native lexical choice, highlighting cognate facilitation as one of the important phenomena shaping the language of non-native speakers.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Cultural Studies, Natural Language Processing

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Citations in the corpus

Fair Is Better than Sensational: Man Is to Doctor as Woman Is to Doctor (2019, methodology): “The second is taken from (Manzini et al. 2019b), and was trained on a Reddit dataset (Rabinovich, Tsvetkov, and Wintner 2018).”
Black is to Criminal as Caucasian is to Police: Detecting and Removing Multiclass Bias in Word Embeddings (2019, methodology): “We used the L2-Reddit corpus (Rabinovich et al., 2018), a collection of Reddit posts and comments by both native and non-native English speakers.”
Mitigation of Unintended Biases against Non-Native English Texts in Sentiment Analysis (2019, methodology): “The choice was motivated by related work presented in section 2 [16].”