Cognates, False Friends, and Partial Cognates

Oana Magdalena Frunza

ISBN 10: 3836486202 / ISBN 13: 9783836486200

Published by VDM Verlag

About this Item

144 pages. Dimensions: 8.9in. x 5.9in. x 0.4in.Cognates are words in different languages that have similar spelling and meaning. They can help second-language learners with vocabulary expansion and reading comprehension. Special attention needs to be paid to pairs of words that appear similar but are in fact false friends: they have different meanings in all contexts. 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 and Computer-Assisted Language Learning tools. The book presents research focused on cognate and false-friend words between two pair of languages, French and English. It presents a method that automatically classifies a pair of words from two languages as cognates or false friends. The method uses Machine Learning techniques with several measures of orthographic similarity as features for classification. The book also describes a supervised and a semi-supervised method that uses bootstrapping techniques for disambiguation of partial cognates and an annotation tool designed for this special type of words. This item ships from multiple locations. Your book may arrive from Roseburg,OR, La Vergne,TN. Bookseller Inventory # 9783836486200

Bibliographic Details

Title: Cognates, False Friends, and Partial ...

Publisher: VDM Verlag

Binding: Paperback

Book Condition:New

Book Type: Paperback

About this title

Synopsis:

Cognates are words in different languages that have similar spelling and meaning. They can help second-language learners with vocabulary expansion and reading comprehension. Special attention needs to be paid to pairs of words that appear similar but are in fact false friends: they have different meanings in all contexts. 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 and Computer-Assisted Language Learning tools. The book presents research focused on cognate and false-friend words between two pair of languages, French and English. It presents a method that automatically classifies a pair of words from two languages as cognates or false friends. The method uses Machine Learning techniques with several measures of orthographic similarity as features for classification. The book also describes a supervised and a semi-supervised method that uses bootstrapping techniques for disambiguation of partial cognates and an annotation tool designed for this special type of words.

About the Author:

Oana M. Frunza, is a PhD student at the University of Ottawa, Canada. Her fields of interest are Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning focusing on text classification, knowledge representation, and information extraction. She has been working as a Research Assistant and a Teaching Assistant at University of Ottawa since 2004.