A Probabilistic Generative Model of Linguistic Typology

Johannes Bjerva, Yova Kementchedjhieva, Ryan Cotterell, Isabelle Augenstein


Abstract
In the principles-and-parameters framework, the structural features of languages depend on parameters that may be toggled on or off, with a single parameter often dictating the status of multiple features. The implied covariance between features inspires our probabilisation of this line of linguistic inquiry—we develop a generative model of language based on exponential-family matrix factorisation. By modelling all languages and features within the same architecture, we show how structural similarities between languages can be exploited to predict typological features with near-perfect accuracy, outperforming several baselines on the task of predicting held-out features. Furthermore, we show that language embeddings pre-trained on monolingual text allow for generalisation to unobserved languages. This finding has clear practical and also theoretical implications: the results confirm what linguists have hypothesised, i.e. that there are significant correlations between typological features and languages.
Anthology ID:
N19-1156
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2019
Address:
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Editors:
Jill Burstein, Christy Doran, Thamar Solorio
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1529–1540
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1156
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N19-1156
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Johannes Bjerva, Yova Kementchedjhieva, Ryan Cotterell, and Isabelle Augenstein. 2019. A Probabilistic Generative Model of Linguistic Typology. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 1529–1540, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Probabilistic Generative Model of Linguistic Typology (Bjerva et al., NAACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/N19-1156.pdf
Presentation:
 N19-1156.Presentation.pptx
Video:
 https://vimeo.com/360714960