# Detecting Unassimilated Borrowings in Spanish: An Annotated Corpus and Approaches to Modeling

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.16169 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16169/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [Neural Architectures for Named Entity Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.01360/) (2016)
- [LinCE: A Centralized Benchmark for Linguistic Code-switching Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04322/) (2020)
- [BPEmb: Tokenization-free Pre-trained Subword Embeddings in 275 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.02187/) (2017)
- [What to do about non-standard (or non-canonical) language in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.07836/) (2016)
- [Overview for the Second Shared Task on Language Identification in Code-Switched Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.13016/) (2019)
- [SeqScore: Addressing Barriers to Reproducible Named Entity Recognition Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14154/) (2021)
- [An Annotated Corpus of Emerging Anglicisms in Spanish Newspaper Headlines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.02929/) (2020)
- [The futility of STILTs for the classification of lexical borrowings in Spanish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08607/) (2021)
- [Overview of ADoBo 2021: Automatic Detection of Unassimilated Borrowings in the Spanish Press](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15682/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Borrowing or Codeswitching? Annotating for Finer-Grained Distinctions in Language Mixing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04973/) (2022)
- [Conditioning LLMs to Generate Code-Switched Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12924/) (2025)
- [LuxBorrow: From Pompier to Pompjee, Tracing Borrowing in Luxembourgish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10789/) (2026)
- [Observatorio Lazaro: A self-populating database of anglicism usage in the Spanish press](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00713/) (2026)
- [Towards a Diagnostic and Predictive Evaluation Methodology for Sequence Labeling Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12759/) (2026)
- [pylazaro: a Python package for anglicism extraction in Spanish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29276/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work presents a new resource for borrowing identification and analyzes the performance and errors of several models on this task. We introduce a new annotated corpus of Spanish newswire rich in unassimilated lexical borrowings -- words from one language that are introduced into another without orthographic adaptation -- and use it to evaluate how several sequence labeling models (CRF, BiLSTM-CRF, and Transformer-based models) perform. The corpus contains 370,000 tokens and is larger, more borrowing-dense, OOV-rich, and topic-varied than previous corpora available for this task. Our results show that a BiLSTM-CRF model fed with subword embeddings along with either Transformer-based embeddings pretrained on codeswitched data or a combination of contextualized word embeddings outperforms results obtained by a multilingual BERT-based model.