A Reproducibility Study on Quantifying Language Similarity: The Impact of Missing Values in the URIEL Knowledge Base

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11320%2F25%3AYPRVIKGG" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11320/25:YPRVIKGG - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

<a href="https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85199501393&partnerID=40&md5=03b04a25ae7f49a5e0951c2656e629ab" target="_blank" >https://www.scopus.com/inward/record.uri?eid=2-s2.0-85199501393&partnerID=40&md5=03b04a25ae7f49a5e0951c2656e629ab</a>

DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

A Reproducibility Study on Quantifying Language Similarity: The Impact of Missing Values in the URIEL Knowledge Base

Original language description

In the pursuit of supporting more languages around the world, tools that characterize properties of languages play a key role in expanding the existing multilingual NLP research. In this study, we focus on a widely used typological knowledge base, URIEL, which aggregates linguistic information into numeric vectors. Specifically, we delve into the soundness and reproducibility of the approach taken by URIEL in quantifying language similarity. Our analysis reveals URIEL’s ambiguity in calculating language distances and in handling missing values. Moreover, we find that URIEL does not provide any information about typological features for 31% of the languages it represents, undermining the reliabilility of the database, particularly on low-resource languages. Our literature review suggests URIEL and lang2vec are used in papers on diverse NLP tasks, which motivates us to rigorously verify the database as the effectiveness of these works depends on the reliability of the information the tool provides. © 2024 Association for Computational Linguistics.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

D - Article in proceedings

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Project

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Continuities

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Publication year

2024

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Article name in the collection

Proc. Conf. North American Chapter Assoc. Comput. Linguist.: Hum. Lang. Technol., NAACL

ISBN

979-8-89176-117-9

ISSN

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e-ISSN

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Number of pages

9

Pages from-to

233-241

Publisher name

Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

Place of publication

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Event location

Mexico City

Event date

Jan 1, 2025

Type of event by nationality

WRD - Celosvětová akce

UT code for WoS article

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