Advancing the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications with New Workflows and Data
Annika Tjuka, Robert Forkel, Christoph Rzymski, Johann-Mattis List
Abstract
Lexical resources are crucial for cross-linguistic analysis and can provide new insights into computational models for natural language learning. Here, we present an advanced database for comparative studies of words with multiple meanings, a phenomenon known as colexification. The new version includes improvements in the handling, selection and presentation of the data. We compare the new database with previous versions and find that our improvements provide a more balanced sample covering more language families worldwide, with enhanced data quality, given that all word forms are provided in phonetic transcription. We conclude that the new Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications has the potential to inspire exciting new studies that link cross-linguistic data to open questions in linguistic typology, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics.- Anthology ID:
- 2025.iwcs-1.1
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Semantics
- Month:
- September
- Year:
- 2025
- Address:
- Düsseldorf, Germany
- Editors:
- Kilian Evang, Laura Kallmeyer, Sylvain Pogodalla
- Venues:
- IWCS | WS
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 1–15
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/iwcs-25-ingestion/2025.iwcs-1.1/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Annika Tjuka, Robert Forkel, Christoph Rzymski, and Johann-Mattis List. 2025. Advancing the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications with New Workflows and Data. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Computational Semantics, pages 1–15, Düsseldorf, Germany. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- Advancing the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications with New Workflows and Data (Tjuka et al., IWCS 2025)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/iwcs-25-ingestion/2025.iwcs-1.1.pdf