Temuulen Khishigsuren


2022

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How Universal is Metonymy? Results from a Large-Scale Multilingual Analysis
Temuulen Khishigsuren | Gábor Bella | Thomas Brochhagen | Daariimaa Marav | Fausto Giunchiglia | Khuyagbaatar Batsuren
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP

Metonymy is regarded by most linguists as a universal cognitive phenomenon, especially since the emergence of the theory of conceptual mappings. However, the field data backing up claims of universality has not been large enough so far to provide conclusive evidence. We introduce a large-scale analysis of metonymy based on a lexical corpus of over 20 thousand metonymy instances from 189 languages and 69 genera. No prior study, to our knowledge, is based on linguistic coverage as broad as ours. Drawing on corpus analysis, evidence of universality is found at three levels: systematic metonymy in general, particular metonymy patterns, and specific metonymy concepts.

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Using Linguistic Typology to Enrich Multilingual Lexicons: the Case of Lexical Gaps in Kinship
Temuulen Khishigsuren | Gábor Bella | Khuyagbaatar Batsuren | Abed Alhakim Freihat | Nandu Chandran Nair | Amarsanaa Ganbold | Hadi Khalilia | Yamini Chandrashekar | Fausto Giunchiglia
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper describes a method to enrich lexical resources with content relating to linguistic diversity, based on knowledge from the field of lexical typology. We capture the phenomenon of diversity through the notion of lexical gap and use a systematic method to infer gaps semi-automatically on a large scale, which we demonstrate on the kinship domain. The resulting free diversity-aware terminological resource consists of 198 concepts, 1,911 words, and 37,370 gaps in 699 languages. We see great potential in the use of resources such as ours for the improvement of a variety of cross-lingual NLP tasks, which we illustrate through an application in the evaluation of machine translation systems.