We propose a method for computing the similarity of natural languages and for clustering them based on their lexical similarity. Our study provides evidence to be used in the investigation of the written intelligibility, i.e., the ability of people writing in different languages to understand one another without prior knowledge of foreign languages. We account for etymons and cognates, we quant...

This paper describes the development of a metric for measuring the semantic distance or similarity of words using the WordNet lexical database. Such a metric could be of use in development of search engines and text retrieval systems, tasks for which the richness of natural language can cause difficulty. Further, such a metric can prove invaluable to psycholinguists who wish to study lexical se...

Aims: Within the current multilingual paradigm shift, transfer is increasingly conceptualised not only as an unintentional mechanism of “interference”, but also intentional used a learner strategy. However, very little known from empirical perspective about (un)intentionality in transfer. This article builds on exploratory study which suggested that background language words fit well within mor...

In the context of a synchronic lexical study of the Gbe varieties of West Africa, this paper explores the question whether the use of different criteria sets to judge the similarity of lexical features in different language varieties yields the same or different conclusions regarding the relative relationships and clustering of the investigated varieties and the prioritization of further sociol...

The UMLS Semantic Network and Metathesaurus are two complementary knowledge sources. While many studies compare relationships across the two structures, their alignment has never been attempted. We applied two methods based on lexical and conceptual similarity to aligning the Semantic Network with the UMLS Metathesaurus. Approximately two thirds of the semantic types could be aligned by lexical...

During language production planning, multiple candidate representations are implicitly activated prior to articulation. Lexical representations that are phonologically related to the target (phonological neighbors) are known to influence phonetic properties of the target word. However, the question of which dimensions of phonological similarity contribute to such lexical-phonetic effects remain...

This article presents our approach to the CEMP task of BioCreative V.5, which consisted in using our system, IBEnt, to identify chemical entity mentions in patents through machine learning and semantic similarity techniques. The features used combine the results of a CRF classifier, two lexical matching methods (FiGO and MER) and semantic similarity measures on ChEBI ontology. We also tested th...