@article{shipton-etal-2026-simple,
    title = "Simple Additions, Substantial Gains: Expanding Scripts, Languages, and Lineage Coverage in {URIEL}+",
    author = "Shipton, Mason  and
      Ng, York Hay  and
      Khan, Aditya  and
      Hoang, Phuong H.  and
      Lu, Xiang  and
      Dogruoz, A. Seza  and
      Lee, Annie En-Shiun",
    editor = "Piperidis, Stelios  and
      Bel, N{\'u}ria  and
      van den Heuvel, Henk  and
      Ide, Nancy  and
      Krek, Simon  and
      Toral, Antonio",
    journal = "International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation",
    volume = "main",
    month = may,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Palma de Mallorca, Spain",
    publisher = "ELRA Language Resource Association",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.863/",
    pages = "11045--11059",
    abstract = "The URIEL+ linguistic knowledge base supports multilingual research by encoding languages through geographic, genetic, and typological vectors. However, data sparsity (e.g. missing feature types, incomplete language entries, and limited genealogical coverage) remains prevalent. This limits the usefulness of URIEL+ in cross-lingual transfer, particularly for supporting low-resource languages. To address this sparsity, we extend URIEL+ by introducing script vectors to represent writing system properties for 7,488 languages, integrating Glottolog to add 18,710 additional languages, and expanding lineage imputation for 26,449 languages by propagating typological and script features across genealogies. These improvements reduce feature sparsity by 14{\%} for script vectors, increase language coverage by up to 19,015 languages (1,007{\%}), and boost imputation quality metrics by up to 35{\%}. Our benchmark on cross-lingual transfer tasks (oriented around low-resource languages) shows occasionally divergent performance compared to URIEL+, with performance gains up to 6{\%} in certain setups."
}