A focused crawler for Romanian words discovery

Abstract

As all natural languages are subject to change over time and as the Web becomes more prevalent, it also constitutes a major source for identifying language evolution. Although these changes affect all linguistic branches ranging from phonetics, lexicon and grammar to semantics and pragmatics, we will focus only on discovering new potential words that entered the Romanian lexicon or alternative forms (lexicalizations) that are frequently used. In this paper we describe the architecture of a system which models the rate of Romanian vocabulary growth based on different statistics gathered by a focused web crawler. In order to validate the proposed system, the paper also presents the main new words identified by the system in online texts written in Romanian.