Search arXiv⌕ Search
Home/Archive/arXiv

arXiv · 2609.34152

Quantitative Measurement of Language Distance among Closely Related Indo-European Languages Using Pretrained Language Models: A Case Study on the North Germanic Branch

Yiping Bai
View original source ↗Read source document ↗Export metadata ↓

Abstract

Among closely related North Germanic languages, the quantification of language distance has traditionally relied on qualitative methods, lacking a unified multi-dimensional computational framework. Multilingual pretrained models based on the Transformer architecture can map texts from different languages into a shared vector space, enabling quantitative measurement of language distance. This paper focuses on the three North Germanic languages---Danish, Norwegian (Bokmål), and Swedish---and proposes a three-metric quantitative framework based on pretrained language models: (1)~sentence-level semantic distance, computed as cosine similarity between LaBSE and mBERT encodings of parallel sentences; (2)~orthographic fragmentation rate, measuring subword tokenization efficiency when cross-applying monolingual BERT vocabularies to parallel texts; (3)~MLM predictability, comparing prediction confidence and entropy in masked language modeling using mBERT across languages. Using 150 trilingual parallel sentence triplets from the Tatoeba corpus as controlled samples, we obtain consistent distance rankings on two independent models: LaBSE: da--no $0.012 < $ no--sv $0.016 < $ da--sv $0.020$; mBERT: da--no $0.016 < $ no--sv $0.045 \approx $ da--sv $0.046$. This ranking is consistent with the historical linguistic conclusion that ``400 years of Danish rule over Norway (1380--1814) led to highly cognate written languages.'' The three metrics---semantic, orthographic, and predictability---converge on the same conclusion, providing a reproducible computational framework for the quantitative study of distance among closely related languages, extensible in principle to more branches of the Indo-European language family, pending validation on additional language groups.

Explore related subjects

cs.CL

Keep this discovery

Explore connections, maps & timelines

BibTeXRIS

Yiping Bai. 2026-09-28. Quantitative Measurement of Language Distance among Closely Related Indo-European Languages Using Pretrained Language Models: A Case Study on the North Germanic Branch. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.34152

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

arXiv2026

Are We Really Making Much Progress in Text Classification? A Comparative Review

We survey the literature on single-label, multi-label, and hierarchical text classification and provide a quantitative comparison of methods categorized into bag-of-words, sequence-based, and graph- or hierarchy-based approaches. Despite a recent surge in graph-based methods, they do not provide an improvement over fine-tuned transformer models on most evaluated datasets. Decoder-only generative language models show promise in few-shot in-context learning, but appear to lag behind fine-tuned language models when sufficient training data is available. The amount of training data needed for a fine-tuned language model to exceed the performance of a generative model is task-dependent. We further highlight the variance in reported numbers across the literature when applying the same model to the same dataset, which can be traced to the use of different hyperparameter values, such as the fine-tuning learning rate. For practitioners, we recommend using a fine-tuned language model when sufficient training data is available. Otherwise, a frozen generative model, enhanced by few-shot in-context learning or reasoning, is preferable. The source code and further information are available at: https://github.com/ascherp/text-classification-survey

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

Dynamic Optimizations of LLM Ensembles with Two-Stage Reinforcement Learning Agents

The advancement of LLMs and their accessibility have triggered renewed interest in multi-agent reinforcement learning as robust and adaptive frameworks for dynamically changing environments. This paper introduces \texttt{RL-Focal}, a two-stage RL agent framework that routes and ensembles LLMs. \textit{First}, we develop the Decider RL-agent, which learns to dynamically select an ensemble of small size ($m_i$) among $N$ LLMs ($m_i \ll N$) for incoming queries from a user-defined downstream task $i$, by maximizing both error-diversity and reasoning-performance of the selected ensemble through iterative updates of task-adaptive rewards and policy. \textit{Second}, to enable effective fusion of dynamically selected LLMs, we develop the stage-2 Fusion RL-agent, which learns to resolve reasoning conflicts from different LLMs and dynamically adapt to different ensemble teams composed by the Decider Agent for different downstream tasks. {\em Third}, we introduce the focal diversity metric to better model the error correlations among multiple LLMs further improving the generalization performance of the Decider Agent, which actively prunes the ensemble combinations. By focal diversity, we enhance performance across tasks by effectively promoting reward-aware and policy-adaptive ensemble selection and inference fusion. Extensive evaluations on five benchmarks show that RL-Focal achieves the performance improvement of 8.48\% with an ensemble of small size compared to the best individual LLM in a pool and offers stronger robustness. Code is available \href{https://github.com/git-disl/RL-Focal}{here}.

cs.CL↗
arXiv2026

TagPR: Tag-Guided Process Supervision for Personalization Reasoning in Large Language Models

Recent advancements have endowed Large Language Models with impressive general reasoning capabilities. However, these reasoning models often perform worse than non-reasoning models on personalization tasks. While some methods use outcome-based RL to improve personalization reasoning, they fail to supervise the reasoning process. As a result, models may reach correct answers through flawed reasoning chains, limiting further improvement. To address this, we propose TagPR, a novel framework that adds semantic tags to the reasoning process for step-by-step guidance. TagPR first automatically generates a structured, tagged dataset for Supervised Fine-Tuning. It then employs a multi-stage RL process guided by a composite reward signal, which integrates tag-based process supervision with a novel Personalization Reward Model with User Embeddings to achieve fine-grained alignment with user-specific logic. Extensive experiments on public LaMP, LongLaMP, PGraphRAG, and a self-constructed dataset demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art results, delivering an average improvement of 32.65% over the base model across all LaMP benchmark tasks. Our work demonstrates that tag-guided process supervision is an effective approach for personalization reasoning.

cs.CL↗