Evaluation of complex typological universals with language vectors and real-valued logics

Abstract

Language representations and typological universals have received increasing attention in computational linguistics over the past few years. Most approaches make use of binary language vectors from typological databases and/or focus on the correlation of only two typological variables at the same time. This thesis shows that real-valued logics can be used to evaluate even more complex formulae, as they are formulated by typologists, on continuous vectors from existing corpora. Syntactic language vectors are extracted from the Universal Dependencies treebanks (Nivre et al., 2016) and serve as the basis for the evaluation of word-order universals.