URIEL+: Enhancing Linguistic Inclusion and Usability in a Typological and Multilingual Knowledge Base

Publication type
U
Publication status
Published
Authors
Khan, A., Shipton, M., Anuragha, D., Duan, K., Hoang, P., Khiu, E., Doğruöz, A., & Lee, E.
Editor
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio and Steven Schockaert
Series
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Pagination
6937-6957
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics (Abu Dhabi/UAE)
Conference
31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics (Abu Dhabi/UAE)
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Abstract

URIEL is a knowledge base offering geographical, phylogenetic, and typological vector representations for 7970 languages. It includes distance measures between these vectors for 4005 languages, which are accessible via the lang2vec tool. Despite being frequently cited, URIEL is limited in terms of linguistic inclusion and overall usability. To tackle these challenges, we introduce URIEL+, an enhanced version of URIEL and lang2vec that addresses these limitations. In addition to expanding typological feature coverage for 2898 languages, URIEL+ improves the user experience with robust, customizable distance calculations to better suit the needs of users. These upgrades also offer competitive performance on downstream tasks and provide distances that better align with linguistic distance studies.