Colex2Lang: Language embeddings from semantic typology

Y Chen, R Biswas, J Bjerva�- The 24th Nordic Conference on�…, 2023 - vbn.aau.dk
The 24th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics, 2023vbn.aau.dk
In semantic typology, colexification refers to words with multiple meanings, either related
(polysemy) or unrelated (homophony). Studies of cross-linguistic colexification have yielded
insights into, eg, psychology, historical linguistics and cognitive science (Xu et al., 2020;
Brochhagen and Boleda, 2022; Schapper and Koptjevskaja-Tamm, 2022). While NLP
research up until now has mainly focused on integrating syntactic typology (Naseem et al.,
2012; Ponti et al., 2019; Chaudhary et al., 2019; �st�n et al., 2020; Ansell et al., 2021;�…
Abstract
In semantic typology, colexification refers to words with multiple meanings, either related (polysemy) or unrelated (homophony). Studies of cross-linguistic colexification have yielded insights into, eg, psychology, historical linguistics and cognitive science (Xu et al., 2020; Brochhagen and Boleda, 2022; Schapper and Koptjevskaja-Tamm, 2022). While NLP research up until now has mainly focused on integrating syntactic typology (Naseem et al., 2012; Ponti et al., 2019; Chaudhary et al., 2019; �st�n et al., 2020; Ansell et al., 2021; Oncevay et al., 2022), we here investigate the potential of incorporating semantic typology, of which colexification is an example. We propose a framework for constructing a large-scale synset graph and learning language representations with node embedding algorithms. We demonstrate that cross-lingual colexification patterns provide a distinct signal for modelling language similarity and predicting typological features. Our representations achieve a 9.97% performance gain in predicting lexico-semantic typological features and expectantly contain a weaker syntactic signal. This study is the first attempt to learn language representations and model language similarities using semantic typology at a large scale, setting a new direction for multilingual NLP, especially for low-resource languages.
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