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New Study Evaluates AI Recognition of Lexical Borrowing

This Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2014 photo shows the word "culture" in the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, in New York. Merriam-Webster has named "culture" its 2014 word of the year. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
This Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2014 photo shows the word "culture" in the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, in New York. Merriam-Webster has named "culture" its 2014 word of the year. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
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New Study Evaluates AI Recognition of Lexical Borrowing

This Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2014 photo shows the word "culture" in the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, in New York. Merriam-Webster has named "culture" its 2014 word of the year. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
This Tuesday, Dec. 9, 2014 photo shows the word "culture" in the Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, in New York. Merriam-Webster has named "culture" its 2014 word of the year. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)

Researchers from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú (PUCP) and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History have investigated the ability of machine learning algorithms to identify lexical borrowings, according to the German News Agency.

Lexical borrowing, or the direct transfer of words from one language to another, helps researchers trace the evolution of modern languages and indicate cultural contact between distinct linguistic groups. However, researchers often face challenges in this field because the tracing process requires the comparison of multiple languages.

"The automated detection of lexical borrowings is still one of the most difficult tasks we face in computational historical linguistics," the Phys.org website quoted lead author Johann-Mattis as saying.

In the current study, researchers trained language models that mimic the way in which linguists identify borrowings using acoustics to detect the words pronounced in the same way in different languages. This similarity indicates that the studied term was actually transferred from a language to another during the different phases of language evolution.

The team said the models were applied to a modified version of the World Loanword Database, a catalog of borrowing information for a sample of 40 languages from different language families all over the world, in order to see how accurately these models can determine the words borrowed from other languages.

In many cases the results were unsatisfying, suggesting that loanword detection is too difficult for machine learning methods most commonly used.

"After these first experiments with monolingual lexical borrowings, we can proceed to stake out other aspects of the problem," says researcher John Miller of PUCP.

Other researchers including co-author Tiago Tresoldi believe that "our computer-assisted approach will shed a new light on the importance of computer-assisted methods for language comparison and historical linguistics."

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Rare Sahara Floods Bring Morocco’s Dried-up South Back to Life

Tourists camp on the shores of Erg Znaigui, a seasonal lake in the village of Merzouga in the Sahara desert in southeastern Morocco on October 20, 2024. (AFP)
Tourists camp on the shores of Erg Znaigui, a seasonal lake in the village of Merzouga in the Sahara desert in southeastern Morocco on October 20, 2024. (AFP)
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Rare Sahara Floods Bring Morocco’s Dried-up South Back to Life

Tourists camp on the shores of Erg Znaigui, a seasonal lake in the village of Merzouga in the Sahara desert in southeastern Morocco on October 20, 2024. (AFP)
Tourists camp on the shores of Erg Znaigui, a seasonal lake in the village of Merzouga in the Sahara desert in southeastern Morocco on October 20, 2024. (AFP)

In Morocco's southeastern desert, a rare downpour has brought lakes and ponds back to life, with locals -- and tourists -- hailing it as a gift from the heavens.

In Merzouga, an attractive tourist town some 600 kilometers (370 miles) southeast of the capital Rabat, the once-parched golden dunes are now dotted with replenished ponds and lakes.

"We're incredibly happy about the recent rains," said Youssef Ait Chiga, a local tour guide leading a group of German tourists to Yasmina Lake nestled amidst Merzouga's dunes.

Khalid Skandouli, another tour guide, said the rain has drawn even more visitors to the tourist area, now particularly eager to witness this odd transformation.

With him, Laetitia Chevallier, a French tourist and regular visitor to the region, said the rainfall has proved a "blessing from the sky".

"The desert became green again, the animals have food again, and the plants and palm trees came back to life," she said.

Locals told AFP the basin had been barren for nearly 20 years.

A man leads his camels along the shores of Yasmina lake, a seasonal lake in the village of Merzouga in the Sahara desert in southeastern Morocco on October 20, 2024. (AFP)

Last year was Morocco's driest in 80 years, with a 48 percent drop in rainfall, according to an October report from the General Directorate of Meteorology (DGM).

But in September, torrential rains triggered floods in southern parts of Morocco, killing at least 28 people, according to authorities.

The rare heavy rains come as the North African kingdom grapples with its worst drought in nearly 40 years, threatening its economically crucial agriculture sector.

Neighboring Algeria saw similar rain and flooding in early September, killing six people.

North African countries currently rank among the world's most water-stressed, according to the World Resources Institute, a non-profit research organization.

The kingdom's meteorological agency described the recent massive rainfall as "exceptional".

It attributed it to an unusual shift of the intertropical convergence zone -- the equatorial region where winds from the northern and southern hemispheres meet, causing thunderstorms and heavy rainfall.

The sun sets behind the dunes at Yasmina lake, a seasonal lake in the village of Merzouga in the Sahara desert in southeastern Morocco on October 20, 2024. (AFP)

- 'Climate change' -

"Everything suggests that this is a sign of climate change," Fatima Driouech, a Moroccan climate scientist, told AFP. "But it's too early to say definitively without thorough studies."

Driouech emphasized the importance of further research to attribute this event to broader climate trends.

Experts say climate change is making extreme weather events, such as storms and droughts, more frequent and intense.

In Morocco's south, the rains have helped partially fill some reservoirs and replenish groundwater aquifers.

But for those levels to significantly rise, experts say the rains would need to continue over a longer period of time.

The rest of the country is still grappling with drought, now in its sixth consecutive year, jeopardizing the agricultural sector that employs over a third of Morocco's workforce.

Tourists take pictures at Yasmina lake, a seasonal lake in the village of Merzouga in the Sahara desert in southeastern Morocco on October 20, 2024. (AFP)

Jean Marc Berhocoirigoin, a 68-year-old French tourist, said he was surprised to find Yasmina Lake replenished. "I hadn't seen these views for 15 years," he said.

Water has also returned to other desert areas such as Erg Znaigui, about 40 kilometers south of Merzouga, AFP reporters saw.

While the rains have breathed life into Morocco's arid southeast, Driouech warns that "a single extreme event can't bring lasting change".

But last week, Morocco's meteorological agency said such downpours could become increasingly frequent, "driven partly by climate change as the intertropical convergence zone shifts further north".