Katherine Kairis


2017

pdf bib
URIEL and lang2vec: Representing languages as typological, geographical, and phylogenetic vectors
Patrick Littell | David R. Mortensen | Ke Lin | Katherine Kairis | Carlisle Turner | Lori Levin
Proceedings of the 15th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Volume 2, Short Papers

We introduce the URIEL knowledge base for massively multilingual NLP and the lang2vec utility, which provides information-rich vector identifications of languages drawn from typological, geographical, and phylogenetic databases and normalized to have straightforward and consistent formats, naming, and semantics. The goal of URIEL and lang2vec is to enable multilingual NLP, especially on less-resourced languages and make possible types of experiments (especially but not exclusively related to NLP tasks) that are otherwise difficult or impossible due to the sparsity and incommensurability of the data sources. lang2vec vectors have been shown to reduce perplexity in multilingual language modeling, when compared to one-hot language identification vectors.