Semi-Supervised Learning of Partial Cognates Using Bilingual Bootstrapping

Partial cognates are pairs of words in two languages that have the same meaning in some, but not all contexts. Detecting the actual meaning of a partial cognate in context can be useful for Machine Translation tools and for Computer-Assisted Language Learning tools. In this paper we propose a supervised and a semisupervised method to disambiguate partial cognates between two languages: French and English. The methods use only automatically-labeled data; therefore they can be applied for other pairs of languages as well. We also show that our methods perform well when using corpora from different domains.