URIEL+: Enhancing Linguistic Inclusion and Usability in a Typological and Multilingual Knowledge Base

TL;DR

URIEL+ is an improved multilingual knowledge base that expands linguistic coverage, enhances usability, and provides more accurate distance measures, supporting better linguistic research and applications.

Contribution

This paper introduces URIEL+, an enhanced version of URIEL that expands typological features, improves user experience, and offers more accurate, customizable distance calculations.

Findings

Expanded typological features for 2898 languages.

Improved distance calculations aligning with linguistic studies.

Competitive performance on downstream linguistic tasks.

Abstract

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.