Bridging Languages through Etymology: The case of cross language text categorization
Vivi Năstase, Carlo Strapparava · Iris (University of Trento) · 2013
We propose the hypothesis that word etymology is useful for NLP applications as a bridge between languages. We support this hypothesis with experiments in crosslanguage (English-Italian) document categorization. In a straightforward bag-ofwords experimental set-up we add etymological ancestors of the words in the documents, and investigate the performance of a model built on English data, on Italian test data (and viceversa). The results show not only statistically significant, but a large improvement – a jump of almost 40 points in F1-score – over the raw (vanilla bag-ofwords) representation. 1