# Measuring cross-language intelligibility between Romance languages with computational tools

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.07447 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.07447/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 4 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 4 of 4)

- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [Loss in Translation: Learning Bilingual Word Mapping with a Retrieval Criterion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.07745/) (2018)
- [A Systematic Comparison of Contextualized Word Embeddings for Lexical Semantic Change](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12011/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present an analysis of mutual intelligibility in related languages applied for languages in the Romance family. We introduce a novel computational metric for estimating intelligibility based on lexical similarity using surface and semantic similarity of related words, and use it to measure mutual intelligibility for the five main Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian), and compare results using both the orthographic and phonetic forms of words as well as different parallel corpora and vectorial models of word meaning representation. The obtained intelligibility scores confirm intuitions related to intelligibility asymmetry across languages and significantly correlate with results of cloze tests in human experiments.