pylazaro: a Python package for anglicism extraction in Spanish

Abstract

Lexical borrowings are words from one language that are introduced into another language. Identifying lexical borrowings in text is a relevant task for data-centric fields in Linguistics such as lexicography or corpus linguistics, but none of the standard libraries for text processing offers such a functionality. In this paper we present pylazaro, an open-source Python package for the automatic extraction of unassimilated lexical borrowings (mostly anglicisms) from Spanish text. pylazaro offers a single interface to five sequence labeling models that were trained using different libraries, so that users can run and switch between them without having to deal with the idiosyncrasies of each library. We describe the design and usage of the package, contrast the performance of its models with that of general-purpose LLMs (which perform poorly at this task: F1 below 0.40, compared to 0.86 for the best model in pylazaro) and report on its adoption: pylazaro has been downloaded more than 58,000 times and is the library behind Observatorio Lazaro, a resource that monitors anglicism usage in the Spanish press. pylazaro can be installed via PyPI, is documented in readthedocs and can be tried through a live demo hosted on HuggingFace Spaces.