# Observatorio Lazaro: A self-populating database of anglicism usage in the Spanish press

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.00713 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00713/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 82 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [NEO-BENCH: Evaluating Robustness of Large Language Models with Neologisms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12261/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Detecting Unassimilated Borrowings in Spanish: An Annotated Corpus and Approaches to Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16169/) (2022)
- [IberBench: LLM Evaluation on Iberian Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16921/) (2025)
- [Are Language Models Borrowing-Blind? A Multilingual Evaluation of Loanword Identification across 10 Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26254/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [pylazaro: a Python package for anglicism extraction in Spanish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29276/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper describes Observatorio L'azaro, a language resource that monitors unassimilated lexical borrowings (predominantly English lexical borrowings or anglicisms) in the Spanish digital press. Since April 2020 the system has automatically processed the daily output of a collection of news outlets, detected borrowings with a neural sequence-labeling model, and made the results available through a public web interface and API. The result is a continuously updated diachronic database which, at the time of writing, records more than two million borrowings across 1.88 million articles and 993 million running tokens of text (2020-2026). The paper documents the resource: we describe the end-to-end pipeline (acquisition, detection, post-processing, storage and access), the data model and the terms of availability; we evaluate the resource through the detector's held-out performance (span-level F1=0.86 for the borrowing class), inter-annotator agreement on the training corpus (Cohen's kappa=0.91) and a manual precision audit of 1,000 spans from the deployed data; and we situate it with respect to Spanish borrowing lexicography, annotated borrowing corpora and neology-monitoring observatories. The data shows that unassimilated anglicisms are used in the Spanish press at a frequency of approximately two anglicisms per thousand tokens, and that this rate remains stable. Our statistical analysis over six years reveals that the anglicism vocabulary in Spanish behaves as an open and growing class, with 58.7% of its types attested only once (53.6% after correcting for detection precision), and that its density is highest in the fashion, technology and lifestyle sections and lowest in political and institutional news. The resource is intended to complement static borrowing dictionaries and one-off annotated corpora by providing a continuously updated record of borrowing in the Spanish press.