Semantic Evidence for Automatic Identification of Cognates

The identification of cognate word pairs has recently started to attract the attention of NLP research, but it is still a rather unexplored area requiring more focused attention. This paper builds on a purely orthographic approach to this task by introducing semantic evidence in the form of monolingual thesauri and corpora to support the identification process. The proposed method is easily portable between languages and specialisation domains, since it does not depend on the availability of parallel texts or extensive knowledge resources, requiring only monolingual corpora and a bilingual dictionary encoding correspondences only the core vocabularies of both languages. Our evaluation of the method on four different language pairs suggests that the introduction of semantic evidence in cognate detection helps to substantially increase the precision of cognate identification.