URIEL+: Enhancing Linguistic Inclusion and Usability in a Typological and Multilingual Knowledge Base
This work addresses linguistic inclusion and usability issues for researchers and practitioners in computational linguistics, though it is incremental as it builds on an existing system.
The authors tackled the limitations of URIEL, a multilingual knowledge base, by introducing URIEL+, which expands typological feature coverage for 2898 languages and improves usability with customizable distance calculations, offering competitive performance on downstream tasks.
URIEL is a knowledge base offering geographical, phylogenetic, and typological vector representations for 7970 languages. It includes distance measures between these vectors for 4005 languages, which are accessible via the lang2vec tool. Despite being frequently cited, URIEL is limited in terms of linguistic inclusion and overall usability. To tackle these challenges, we introduce URIEL+, an enhanced version of URIEL and lang2vec that addresses these limitations. In addition to expanding typological feature coverage for 2898 languages, URIEL+ improves the user experience with robust, customizable distance calculations to better suit the needs of users. These upgrades also offer competitive performance on downstream tasks and provide distances that better align with linguistic distance studies.