This paper will have a holistic view at the field of corpus-based linguistic typology and present an overview of current advances at Leipzig University. Our goal is to use automatically created text data for a large variety of languages for quantitative typological investigations. In our approaches we utilize text corpora created for several hundred languages for crosslanguage quantitative stud...

Some language types are more frequent among the world’s languages than others, and the field of linguistic typology attempts to elucidate the reasons for such differences in type frequency. However, there is no consensus in that field about the stochastic processes that shape these frequencies, and there is thus likewise no agreement about the expected probability distribution of typological fr...

A core part of linguistic typology is the classification of languages according to linguistic properties, such as those detailed in the World Atlas of Language Structure (WALS). Doing this manually is prohibitively time-consuming, which is in part evidenced by the fact that only 100 out of over 7,000 languages spoken in the world are fully covered in WALS. We learn distributed language represen...

We present a library of implemented HPSG analyses for argument optionality based on typological studies of this phenomenon in the world’s languages, developed in the context of a grammar customization system that pairs a crosslinguistic core grammar with extensions for non-universal phenomena on the basis of user input of typological properties. Our analyses are compatible with multiple interse...

For phylogenetic inference, linguistic typology is a promising alternative to lexical evidence because it allows us to compare an arbitrary pair of languages. A challenging problem with typology-based phylogenetic inference is that the changes of typological features over time are less intuitive than those of lexical features. In this paper, we work on reconstructing typologically natural ances...

A typological model of shyness as neurotic-introversion has been suggested but never evaluated. We compared the ability of two direct measures of trait-shyness (Revised Shyness scale, Social Anxiety scale) and two typological measures (additive and interactive versions of neurotic-introversion) to predict peer-rated shyness and talk-time in leaderless groups. One hundred and twenty participants...

Although linguistic typology has a long history, computational approaches have only recently gained popularity. The use of distributed representations in computational linguistics has also become increasingly popular. A recent development is to learn distributed representations of language, such that typologically similar languages are spatially close to one another. Although empirical successe...

Recent historiography of 19th century biology supports the revision of two traditional doctrines about the history of biology. First, the most important and widespread biological debate around the time of Darwin was not evolution versus creation, but biological functionalism versus structuralism. Second, the “idealist” and “typological” structuralist theories of the time were not particularly a...

The recent availability of typological databases such as World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) has spurred investigations regarding their utility for language classification, the stability of typological features in genetic linguistics and typological universals across the language families of the world. Existing work on building NLP resources such as parallel corpora, treebanks for under-r...

F or me (Dedre) Dan has been a protean figure. 1 first met him when I was a graduate student at the University of California, San Diego and he was a young professor at Berkeley. He was brilliant, charismatic, and compelling, yet at times engagingly shy. We stayed connected through a circle of friends centered in Nijmegen and the Bay Area, a group united by a passion for psychoIogically juicy th...