Comparing Fifty Natural Languages and Twelve Genetic Languages Using Word Embedding Language Divergence (WELD) as a Quantitative Measure of Language Distance

TL;DR

This paper introduces WELD, a novel quantitative measure based on word embeddings, to compare and analyze linguistic and genetic languages, revealing meaningful clustering and differences across diverse language families and genomes.

Contribution

The paper presents WELD, a new divergence measure for languages using word embeddings, applied to natural and genetic languages, demonstrating its effectiveness in language classification and genetic comparison.

Findings

Languages within the same family tend to cluster together.

Significant differences are observed between human/animal and plant genetic languages.

WELD effectively distinguishes language and genetic similarities and differences.

Abstract

We introduce a new measure of distance between languages based on word embedding, called word embedding language divergence (WELD). WELD is defined as divergence between unified similarity distribution of words between languages. Using such a measure, we perform language comparison for fifty natural languages and twelve genetic languages. Our natural language dataset is a collection of sentence-aligned parallel corpora from bible translations for fifty languages spanning a variety of language families. Although we use parallel corpora, which guarantees having the same content in all languages, interestingly in many cases languages within the same family cluster together. In addition to natural languages, we perform language comparison for the coding regions in the genomes of 12 different organisms (4 plants, 6 animals, and two human subjects). Our result confirms a significant high-level difference in the genetic language model of humans/animals versus plants. The proposed method is a step toward defining a quantitative measure of similarity between languages, with applications in languages classification, genre identification, dialect identification, and evaluation of translations.