---
language:
- fr
- it
- pt
- ro
- es
- en
multilinguality:
- multilingual
license: cc-by-4.0
viewer: false
---

> [!NOTE]
> Dataset origin: https://lrec2020.lrec-conf.org/sharedlrs2020/180_res_1.zip

## Description
This lexicon of false friends pairs in 6 languages, includes for each language pair automatically detected pairs of false friends along with a score of falseness.

## Citation
```
@inproceedings{uban-dinu-2020-automatically,
    title = "Automatically Building a Multilingual Lexicon of False {F}riends With No Supervision",
    author = "Uban, Ana Sabina  and
      Dinu, Liviu P.",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      B{\'e}chet, Fr{\'e}d{\'e}ric  and
      Blache, Philippe  and
      Choukri, Khalid  and
      Cieri, Christopher  and
      Declerck, Thierry  and
      Goggi, Sara  and
      Isahara, Hitoshi  and
      Maegaard, Bente  and
      Mariani, Joseph  and
      Mazo, H{\'e}l{\`e}ne  and
      Moreno, Asuncion  and
      Odijk, Jan  and
      Piperidis, Stelios",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference",
    month = may,
    year = "2020",
    address = "Marseille, France",
    publisher = "European Language Resources Association",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.367",
    pages = "3001--3007",
    abstract = "Cognate words, defined as words in different languages which derive from a common etymon, can be useful for language learners, who can leverage the orthographical similarity of cognates to more easily understand a text in a foreign language. Deceptive cognates, or false friends, do not share the same meaning anymore; these can be instead deceiving and detrimental for language acquisition or text understanding in a foreign language. We use an automatic method of detecting false friends from a set of cognates, in a fully unsupervised fashion, based on cross-lingual word embeddings. We implement our method for English and five Romance languages, including a low-resource language (Romanian), and evaluate it against two different gold standards. The method can be extended easily to any language pair, requiring only large monolingual corpora for the involved languages and a small bilingual dictionary for the pair. We additionally propose a measure of {``}falseness{''} of a false friends pair. We publish freely the database of false friends in the six languages, along with the falseness scores for each cognate pair. The resource is the largest of the kind that we are aware of, both in terms of languages covered and number of word pairs.",
    language = "English",
    ISBN = "979-10-95546-34-4",
}
```