Linguistics from a topological viewpoint
This work addresses visualization difficulties for linguists using typological databases, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a specific dataset.
The authors tackled the challenge of visualizing categorical linguistic typological data by developing a workflow that applies multiple correspondence analysis and topological data analysis to analyze the topological shapes of South American languages.
Typological databases in linguistics are usually categorical-valued. As a result, it is difficult to have a clear visualization of the data. In this paper, we describe a workflow to analyze the topological shapes of South American languages by applying multiple correspondence analysis technique and topological data analysis methods.