Abstract
In semantic typology, colexification refers to words with multiple meanings, either related (polysemy) or unrelated (homophony). Studies of cross-linguistic colexification have yielded insights into, e.g., psychology, historical linguistics and cognitive science (Xu et al., 2020; Brochhagen and Boleda, 2022; Schapper and Koptjevskaja-Tamm, 2022). While NLP research up until now has mainly focused on integrating syntactic typology (Naseem et al., 2012; Ponti et al., 2019; Chaudhary et al., 2019; Üstün et al., 2020; Ansell et al., 2021; Oncevay et al., 2022), we here investigate the potential of incorporating semantic typology, of which colexification is an example. We propose a framework for constructing a large-scale synset graph and learning language representations with node embedding algorithms. We demonstrate that cross-lingual colexification patterns provide a distinct signal for modelling language similarity and predicting typological features. Our representations achieve a 9.97% performance gain in predicting lexico-semantic typological features and expectantly contain a weaker syntactic signal. This study is the first attempt to learn language representations and model language similarities using semantic typology at a large scale, setting a new direction for multilingual NLP, especially for low-resource languages.- Anthology ID:
- 2023.nodalida-1.67
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2023
- Address:
- Tórshavn, Faroe Islands
- Editors:
- Tanel Alumäe, Mark Fishel
- Venue:
- NoDaLiDa
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- University of Tartu Library
- Note:
- Pages:
- 673–684
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_missing_videos/2023.nodalida-1.67/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Yiyi Chen, Russa Biswas, and Johannes Bjerva. 2023. Colex2Lang: Language Embeddings from Semantic Typology. In Proceedings of the 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics (NoDaLiDa), pages 673–684, Tórshavn, Faroe Islands. University of Tartu Library.
- Cite (Informal):
- Colex2Lang: Language Embeddings from Semantic Typology (Chen et al., NoDaLiDa 2023)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/add_missing_videos/2023.nodalida-1.67.pdf