Modeling Language Variation and Universals: A Survey on Typological Linguistics for Natural Language Processing

Edoardo Maria Ponti, Helen O’Horan, Yevgeni Berzak, Ivan Vulić, Roi Reichart, Thierry Poibeau, Ekaterina Shutova, Anna Korhonen

Abstract
Linguistic typology aims to capture structural and semantic variation across the world’s languages. A large-scale typology could provide excellent guidance for multilingual Natural Language Processing (NLP), particularly for languages that suffer from the lack of human labeled resources. We present an extensive literature survey on the use of typological information in the development of NLP techniques. Our survey demonstrates that to date, the use of information in existing typological databases has resulted in consistent but modest improvements in system performance. We show that this is due to both intrinsic limitations of databases (in terms of coverage and feature granularity) and under-utilization of the typological features included in them. We advocate for a new approach that adapts the broad and discrete nature of typological categories to the contextual and continuous nature of machine learning algorithms used in contemporary NLP. In particular, we suggest that such an approach could be facilitated by recent developments in data-driven induction of typological knowledge.
Anthology ID:
J19-3005
Volume:
Computational Linguistics, Volume 45, Issue 3 - September 2019
Month:
September
Year:
2019
Address:
Cambridge, MA
Venue:
CL
SIG:
Publisher:
MIT Press
Note:
Pages:
559–601
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/J19-3005
DOI:
10.1162/coli_a_00357
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Edoardo Maria Ponti, Helen O’Horan, Yevgeni Berzak, Ivan Vulić, Roi Reichart, Thierry Poibeau, Ekaterina Shutova, and Anna Korhonen. 2019. Modeling Language Variation and Universals: A Survey on Typological Linguistics for Natural Language Processing. Computational Linguistics, 45(3):559–601.
Cite (Informal):
Modeling Language Variation and Universals: A Survey on Typological Linguistics for Natural Language Processing (Ponti et al., CL 2019)
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