Language Diversity: Visible to Humans, Exploitable by Machines

TL;DR

The paper introduces the Universal Knowledge Core, a multilingual lexical database that visualizes language diversity for humans and enables cross-lingual applications for machines.

Contribution

It presents a large-scale multilingual lexical database with tools and data for visualizing and exploiting language diversity across over a thousand languages.

Findings

Provides access to millions of words and meanings

Shows phenomena like shared meanings and cognate clusters

Enables cross-lingual applications

Abstract

The Universal Knowledge Core (UKC) is a large multilingual lexical database with a focus on language diversity and covering over a thousand languages. The aim of the database, as well as its tools and data catalogue, is to make the somewhat abstract notion of diversity visually understandable for humans and formally exploitable by machines. The UKC website lets users explore millions of individual words and their meanings, but also phenomena of cross-lingual convergence and divergence, such as shared interlingual meanings, lexicon similarities, cognate clusters, or lexical gaps. The UKC LiveLanguage Catalogue, in turn, provides access to the underlying lexical data in a computer-processable form, ready to be reused in cross-lingual applications.