The identification of cognates between two distinct languages has recently started to attract the attention of NLP research, but there has been little research into using semantic evidence to detect cognates. The approach presented in this paper aims to detect English-French cognates within monolingual texts (texts that are not accompanied by aligned translated equivalents), by integrating word shape similarity approaches with word sense disambiguation techniques in order to account for context. Our implementation is based on BabelNet, a semantic network that incorporates a multilingual encyclopedic dictionary. Our approach is evaluated on two manually annotated da-tasets. The first one shows that across different types of natural text, our method can identify the cognates with an overall accuracy of 80%. The second one, consisting of control sentences with semi-cognates acting as either true cognates or false friends, shows that our method can identify 80% of semi-cognates acting as cognates but also identifies 75% of the semi-cognates acting as false friends.
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