Martin Vastl


2020

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Predicting Typological Features in WALS using Language Embeddings and Conditional Probabilities: ÚFAL Submission to the SIGTYP 2020 Shared Task
Martin Vastl | Daniel Zeman | Rudolf Rosa
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Computational Research in Linguistic Typology

We present our submission to the SIGTYP 2020 Shared Task on the prediction of typological features. We submit a constrained system, predicting typological features only based on the WALS database. We investigate two approaches. The simpler of the two is a system based on estimating correlation of feature values within languages by computing conditional probabilities and mutual information. The second approach is to train a neural predictor operating on precomputed language embeddings based on WALS features. Our submitted system combines the two approaches based on their self-estimated confidence scores. We reach the accuracy of 70.7% on the test data and rank first in the shared task.