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Measuring diachronic language distance using perplexity: Application to English, Portuguese, and Spanish

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 July 2019

José Ramom Pichel Campos Open the ORCID record for José Ramom Pichel Campos [Opens in a new window] ,
Pablo Gamallo Otero Open the ORCID record for Pablo Gamallo Otero [Opens in a new window]  and
Iñaki Alegria Loinaz Open the ORCID record for Iñaki Alegria Loinaz [Opens in a new window]
José Ramom Pichel Campos*
Affiliation:
imaxin|software, Language Technologies, Galiza, Spain
Pablo Gamallo Otero
Affiliation:
CiTIUS, University of Santiago de Compostela, Galiza, Spain. Email: pablo.gamallo@usc.es
Iñaki Alegria Loinaz
Affiliation:
IXA group, Univ. of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), Donostia/San Sebastián, Basque Country, Spain. Email: i.alegria@ehu.eus
*
*Corresponding author. Email: jramompichel@imaxin.com
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Abstract

The objective of this work is to set a corpus-driven methodology to quantify automatically diachronic language distance between chronological periods of several languages. We apply a perplexity-based measure to written text representing different historical periods of three languages: European English, European Portuguese, and European Spanish. For this purpose, we have built historical corpora for each period, which have been compiled from different open corpus sources containing texts as close as possible to its original spelling. The results of our experiments show that a diachronic language distance based on perplexity detects the linguistic evolution that had already been explained by the historians of the three languages. It is remarkable to underline that it is an unsupervised multilingual method which only needs a raw corpora organized by periods.

Keywords

Corpus linguisticsLanguage resourcesSimilarity
Type
Article
Information
Natural Language Engineering , Volume 26 , Issue 4 , July 2020 , pp. 433 - 454
Copyright
© Cambridge University Press 2019

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