{"slug": "we-hebben-een-serieus-translatie-modeling-intercomprehension-as-probabilistic", "title": "We Hebben Een Serieus Translatie: Modeling Intercomprehension as Probabilistic Inference", "summary": "Researchers developed a Bayesian model of intercomprehension—zero-shot understanding of a related language—using an L1 language model and a noise model to infer L2-to-L1 mappings. The model aligned closely with human performance on Dutch, Italian, and Ukrainian utterances and outperformed larger zero-shot models, offering a cognitively plausible computational account of cross-language comprehension.", "body_md": "arXiv:2607.12169v1 Announce Type: new\nAbstract: Intercomprehension refers to partial intelligibility of an unfamiliar language (L2) by a speaker of a related language (L1). How is this zero-shot cross-language comprehension possible? In this work, we extend past work on algorithmic models of noisy-channel inference to model intercomprehension in a Bayesian framework. The model uses an LM in L1 only for scoring latent hypotheses about the translations of observed L2 utterances, and a general-purpose noise model to infer a mapping between L2 and L1 words based on either form-based similarity or symbolic rules. We then conduct a human behavioral experiment, eliciting inferences for utterances in Dutch, Italian, and Ukrainian from speakers of English, Spanish, and Russian, respectively. Our full model shows a closer alignment to the distribution of human intercomprehension performance than ablations, and also compares favorably to zero-shot prompting of much larger models. These results provide a cognitively plausible computational model of intercomprehension, and highlight the flexible inferences made by comprehenders under wide uncertainty in real-world cross-language scenarios. We share our code publicly.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-hebben-een-serieus-translatie-modeling-intercomprehension-as-probabilistic", "canonical_source": "https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12169", "published_at": "2026-07-15 04:00:00+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-15 04:32:54.761726+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["natural-language-processing", "machine-learning", "artificial-intelligence"], "entities": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-hebben-een-serieus-translatie-modeling-intercomprehension-as-probabilistic", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-hebben-een-serieus-translatie-modeling-intercomprehension-as-probabilistic.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-hebben-een-serieus-translatie-modeling-intercomprehension-as-probabilistic.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/we-hebben-een-serieus-translatie-modeling-intercomprehension-as-probabilistic.jsonld"}}