Natural Language Engineering 1 (1): 000–000. Printed in the United Kingdom 1 c 1998 Cambridge University Press Unsupervised Separation of Native and Loanwords for Malayalam and Teluguyz Sridhama Prakhya1 and Deepak P2 1HHMI Janelia Research Campus, Ashburn VA, USA 2Queen’s University Belfast, UK
[email protected] [email protected] ( Received 29 October 2019 ) Abstract Quite often, words from one language are adopted within a different language without translation; these words appear in transliterated form in text written in the latter lan- guage. This phenomenon is particularly widespread within Indian languages where many words are loaned from English. In this paper, we address the task of identifying loanwords automatically and in an unsupervised manner, from large datasets of words from aggluti- native Dravidian languages. We target two specific languages from the Dravidian family, viz., Malayalam and Telugu. Based on familiarity with the languages, we outline an obser- vation that native words in both these languages tend to be characterized by a much more versatile stem - stem being a shorthand to denote the subword sequence formed by the first few characters of the word - than words that are loaned from other languages. We harness this observation to build an objective function and an iterative optimization formulation to optimize for it, yielding a scoring of each word’s nativeness in the process. Through an extensive empirical analysis over real-world datasets from both Malayalam and Tel- ugu, we illustrate the effectiveness of our method in quantifying nativeness effectively over available baselines for the task. 1 Introduction arXiv:2002.05527v1 [cs.CL] 12 Feb 2020 Malayalam and Telugu are two widely spoken languages in southern India: Malay- alam is an official state language of Kerala, Lakshadweep, and Mahe while Telugu is the official state language of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.