# pylazaro: a Python package for anglicism extraction in Spanish

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.29276 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.29276/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 19 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Sep 2026.

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

- [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)
- [Overview of ADoBo 2021: Automatic Detection of Unassimilated Borrowings in the Spanish Press](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15682/) (2021)
- [Observatorio Lazaro: A self-populating database of anglicism usage in the Spanish press](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.00713/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Lexical borrowings are words from one language that are introduced into another language. Identifying lexical borrowings in text is a relevant task for data-centric fields in Linguistics such as lexicography or corpus linguistics, but none of the standard libraries for text processing offers such a functionality. In this paper we present pylazaro, an open-source Python package for the automatic extraction of unassimilated lexical borrowings (mostly anglicisms) from Spanish text. pylazaro offers a single interface to five sequence labeling models that were trained using different libraries, so that users can run and switch between them without having to deal with the idiosyncrasies of each library. We describe the design and usage of the package, contrast the performance of its models with that of general-purpose LLMs (which perform poorly at this task: F1 below 0.40, compared to 0.86 for the best model in pylazaro) and report on its adoption: pylazaro has been downloaded more than 58,000 times and is the library behind Observatorio Lazaro, a resource that monitors anglicism usage in the Spanish press. pylazaro can be installed via PyPI, is documented in readthedocs and can be tried through a live demo hosted on HuggingFace Spaces.