Researchers on bilingual processing can benefit from computational tools developed in artificial intelligence. We show that a normalized Levenshtein distance function can efficiently and reliably simulate bilingual orthographic similarity ratings. Orthographic similarity distributions of cognates and non-cognates were identified across pairs of six European languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch. Semantic equivalence was determined using the conceptual structure of a translation database. By using a similarity threshold, large numbers of cognates could be selected that nearly completely included the stimulus materials of experimental studies. The identified numbers of form-similar and identical cognates correlated highly with branch lengths of phylogenetic language family trees, supporting the usefulness of the new measure for cross-language comparison. The normalized Levenshtein distance function can be considered as a new formal model of cross-language orthographic similarity

The coinciding form and meaning similarity of cognates, e.g. ‘flamme’ (French), ‘Flamme’ (German), ‘vlam’ (Dutch), meaning ‘flame’ in English, facilitates learning of additional languages. The cross-language frequency and similarity distributions of cognates vary according to evolutionary change and language contact. We compare frequency and orthographic (O), phonetic (P), and semantic similarity of cognates, automatically identified in semi-complete lexicons of six widely spoken languages. Comparisons of P and O similarity reveal inconsistent mappings in language pairs with deep orthographies. The frequency distributions show that cognate frequency is reduced in less closely related language pairs as compared to more closely related languages (e.g., French-English vs. German-English). These frequency and similarity patterns may support a better understanding of cognate processing in natural and experimental settings. The automatically identified cognates are available in the supplementary materials, including the frequency and similarity measurements.

This article presents a new, hybrid approach that projects an initial query result onto global information, yielding a local conceptual overview. Concepts found this way are candidates for query refinement.We show that the resulting conceptual structure after a typical short query of 2 terms, contains refinements that perform just as well as a most accurate query formulation.Subsequently we illustrate that query by navigation is an effective mechanism which in most cases finds the optimal concept in a small number of steps. When an optimal concept is not found, the navigation process still finds an acceptable sub-optimum.

Operators on naval ships have to act in dynamic, critical and highdemand task environments. For these environments, a cognitive task load (CTL) model has been proposed as foundation of three operator support functions: adaptive task allocation, cognitive aids and resource feedback. This paper presents the construction of such a model as a Bayesian network with probability relationships between CTL and performance. The network is trained and tested with two datasets: operator performance with an adaptive user interface in a lab-setting and operator performance on a high-tech sailing ship. The "Naïve Bayesian network" tuned out to be the best choice, providing performance estimations with 86% and 74% accuracy for respectively the lab and ship data. Overall, the resulting model nicely generalizes over the two datasets. It will be used to estimate operator performance under momentary CTL-conditions, and to set the thresholds of the load-mitigation strategies for the three support functions.

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