Automatic Identification of Cognates and False Friends in French and English
Abstract: Cognates are words in different languages that have similar spelling and meaning. They can help a second-language learner on the tasks of
vocabulary expansion and reading comprehension.
The learner also needs to pay attention to pairs of words that appear similar but are in fact False Friends: they have different meaning in
some contexts or in all contexts. My research will propose a method to automatically classify a pair of words as Cognates or False Friends.
We focus on French and English, but the methods are applicable to other language pairs. We use several measures of orthographic similarity
as features for classification. We study the impact of selecting different features, averaging them, and combining them through
machine learning techniques.