Linguistically Naïve != Language Independent: Why NLP Needs Linguistic Typology

100 Things You Always Wanted to Know about Linguistics But Were Afraid to Ask*

Many NLP tasks have at their core a subtask of extracting the dependencies---who did what to whom---from natural language sentences. This task can be understood as the inverse of the problem solved in different ways by diverse human languages, namely, how to indicate the relationship between different parts of a sentence. Understanding how languages solve the problem can be extremely useful in ...

Language Review/A New Approach to the Systematic Typology of Languages: Introduction and Review of Fundamentals of Linguistic Typology, Rafe’eh Khoshkhoo

Survey on the Use of Typological Information in Natural Language Processing

In recent years linguistic typology, which classifies the world’s languages according to their functional and structural properties, has been widely used to support multilingual NLP. While the growing importance of typological information in supporting multilingual tasks has been recognised, no systematic survey of existing typological resources and their use in NLP has been published. This pap...

Tagging Ingush - Language Technology For Low-Resource Languages Using Resources From Linguistic Field Work

This paper presents on-going work on creating NLP tools for under-resourced languages from very sparse training data coming from linguistic field work. In this work, we focus on Ingush, a Nakh-Daghestanian language spoken by about 300,000 people in the Russian republics Ingushetia and Chechnya. We present work on morphosyntactic taggers trained on transcribed and linguistically analyzed recordi...

Repurposing Theoretical Linguistic Data for Tool Development and Search

For the majority of the world’s languages, the number of linguistic resources (e.g., annotated corpora and parallel data) is very limited. Consequently, supervised methods, as well as many unsupervised methods, cannot be applied directly, leaving these languages largely untouched and unnoticed. In this paper, we describe the construction of a resource that taps the large body of linguistically ...