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Cit. " In general, the procedure works best for other European languages like French, Portuguese and Spanish. "

[I am easily wrong but] may the highest "similarities" be due to the neolatin root of some european languages ?

All the languages are aligned to English which I presume biases it towards romance/germanic languages. Later on comparisons are are made showing how better performance can be obtained by choosing a more suitable language to align to, for example Russian and Ukrainian.

Ukrainian language is language that has a lot of common words with Czech and Polish. I can simply take article written in one of those languages and start reading without any knowledge about those languages.

And this matrix shows that it has nothing common. Instead only Belorussian(?) and Russian are darkest marks on UK line.

It just compares LETTERS and not SOUNDS of those words.

yes tempay precisely, because we use English as our reference, there is bias in favour of languages similar to English. Additionally the bigger a language's wikipedia, the higher quality the word vectors, which also tends to improve performance

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