Measuring cross-language intelligibility between Romance languages with computational tools

Liviu P Dinu, Ana Sabina Uban, Bogdan Iordache, Anca Dinu, Simona Georgescu
2/7/2026
cs.CL

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Abstract

We present an analysis of mutual intelligibility in related languages applied for languages in the Romance family. We introduce a novel computational metric for estimating intelligibility based on lexical similarity using surface and semantic similarity of related words, and use it to measure mutual intelligibility for the five main Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian), and compare results using both the orthographic and phonetic forms of words as well as different parallel corpora and vectorial models of word meaning representation. The obtained intelligibility scores confirm intuitions related to intelligibility asymmetry across languages and significantly correlate with results of cloze tests in human experiments.

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Cite this paper

@article{dinu2026measuring,
  title  = {Measuring cross-language intelligibility between Romance languages with computational tools},
  author = {Liviu P Dinu and Ana Sabina Uban and Bogdan Iordache and Anca Dinu and Simona Georgescu},
  year   = {2026},
  eprint = {2602.07447},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07447v1}
}

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