Word Transformation Heuristics Agains Lexicons for Cognate Detection

One of the most common lexical transformations between cognates in French and English is the presence or absence of a terminal “e”. However, many other transformations exist, such as a vowel with a circumflex corresponding to the vowel and the letter s. Our algorithms tested the effectiveness of taking the entire English and French lexicons from Treetagger, deaccenting the French lexicon, and taking the intersection of the two. Words shorter than 6 letters were excluded from the list, and a set of lexical transformations were also used prior to intersecting, to increase the potential pool of cognates. The result was 15% above the baseline cognate list in the initial test set, but only 1% above it in the final test set. However, its accuracy was consistant at about 37% for both test sets.