Abstract
Quantifying language distance among closely related languages remains a core challenge in quantitative linguistics. Our previous work [1] introduced QuanLing (Quantitative Linguistics via Pretrained Language Models), a quantitative framework combining language distance metrics (sentence embedding distance, tokenization fragmentation rate) with language property analysis (MLM prediction probability), validated on North Germanic (Danish, Norwegian Bokmål, Swedish). This paper extends QuanLing to Western Romance--French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian--testing cross-branch applicability with the same metric family and aggregation protocol as our North Germanic study, adapted for four languages (English anchor, quadruplet construction). Using 150 four-language parallel sentences, we compute LaBSE sentence embedding distances, tokenization fragmentation rates from four monolingual BERT tokenizers, and mBERT masked language model mutual intelligibility. Results show that Portuguese--Spanish are closest (LaBSE distance 0.0229), French--Italian most distant (0.0338); LaBSE and mBERT rankings agree on 4 of 6 pairs, confirming cross-model robustness. Western Romance shows a wider absolute distance span than North Germanic (0.011 vs. 0.008) but comparable relative ratios (1.48 vs. 1.67), consistent with longer divergence time. French exhibits notably higher MLM predictability (36.12% top-1 accuracy vs. 29.28% for Italian), reflecting its orthography--phonology decoupling. This cross-branch validation provides further evidence for QuanLing's generalizability beyond a single language branch.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08851
