Uncovering Probabilistic Implications in Typological Knowledge Bases

Johannes Bjerva, Yova Kementchedjhieva, Ryan Cotterell, Isabelle Augenstein
2019 Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics  
The study of linguistic typology is rooted in the implications we find between linguistic features, such as the fact that languages with object-verb word ordering tend to have postpositions. Uncovering such implications typically amounts to time-consuming manual processing by trained and experienced linguists, which potentially leaves key linguistic universals unexplored. In this paper, we present a computational model which successfully identifies known universals, including Greenberg
more » ... s, but also uncovers new ones, worthy of further linguistic investigation. Our approach outperforms baselines previously used for this problem, as well as a strong baseline from knowledge base population.
doi:10.18653/v1/p19-1382 dblp:conf/acl/BjervaKCA19 fatcat:l635suxinrbxpejqsvkayccqvi