A Graph Diffusion Algorithm for Lexical Similarity Evaluation

In this paper, we present an algorithm for evaluating lexical similarity between a given language and several reference language clusters. As an input, we have a list of concepts and the corresponding translations in all considered languages. Moreover, each reference language is assigned to one of c language clusters. For each of the concepts, the algorithm computes the distance between each pair of translations. Based on these distances, it constructs a weighted directed graph, where every vertex represents a language. After, it solves a graph diffusion equation with a Dirichlet boundary condition, where the unknown is a map from the vertex set to ℝc. The resulting coordinates are values from the interval [0,1] and they can be interpreted as probabilities of belonging to each of the clusters or as a lexical similarity distribution with respect to the reference clusters. The distances between translations are calculated using phonetic transcriptions and a modification of the Damerau-Levenshtein distance. The algorithm can be useful in analyzing relationships between languages spoken in multilingual territories with a lot of mutual influences. We demonstrate this by presenting a case study regarding various European languages.