The Swadesh approach for determining the temporal separation between two languages relies on the stochastic process of words replacement (when a complete new word emerges to represent a given concept). It is well known that the basic assumptions of the Swadesh approach are often unrealistic due to various contamination phenomena and misjudgments (horizontal transfers, variations over time and space of the replacement rate, incorrect assessments of cognacy relationships, presence of synonyms, and so on). All of this means that the results cannot be completely correct. More importantly, even in the unrealistic case that all basic assumptions are satisfied, simple mathematics places limits on the accuracy of estimating the temporal separation between two languages. These limits, which are purely probabilistic in nature and which are often neglected in lexicostatistical studies, are analyzed in detail in this article. Furthermore, in this work we highlight that the evolution of a language's lexicon is also driven by another stochastic process: gradual lexical modification of words. We show that this process equally also represents a major contribution to the reshaping of the vocabulary of languages over the centuries and we also show, from a purely probabilistic perspective, that taking into account this second random process significantly increases the precision in determining the temporal separation between two languages.

In the financial industry, identifying the location of parties involved in payments is a major challenge in the context of various regulatory requirements. For this purpose address parsing entails extracting fields such as street, postal code, or country from free text message attributes. While payment processing platforms are updating their standards with more structured formats such as SWIFT with ISO 20022, address parsing remains essential for a considerable volume of messages. With the emergence of Transformers and Generative Large Language Models (LLM), we explore the performance of state-of-the-art solutions given the constraint of processing a vast amount of daily data. This paper also aims to show the need for training robust models capable of dealing with real-world noisy transactional data. Our results suggest that a well fine-tuned Transformer model using early-stopping significantly outperforms other approaches. Nevertheless, generative LLMs demonstrate strong zero-shot performance and warrant further investigations.

Word2Vec's Skip Gram model is the current state-of-the-art approach for estimating the distributed representation of words. However, it assumes a single vector per word, which is not well-suited for representing words that have multiple senses. This work presents LDMI, a new model for estimating distributional representations of words. LDMI relies on the idea that, if a word carries multiple senses, then having a different representation for each of its senses should lead to a lower loss associated with predicting its co-occurring words, as opposed to the case when a single vector representation is used for all the senses. After identifying the multi-sense words, LDMI clusters the occurrences of these words to assign a sense to each occurrence. Experiments on the contextual word similarity task show that LDMI leads to better performance than competing approaches.