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        <title>The Past, Present, and Future of Typological Databases in NLP</title>
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    <abstract>Typological information has the potential to be beneficial in the development of NLP models, particularly for low-resource languages. Unfortunately, current large-scale typological databases, notably WALS and Grambank, are inconsistent both with each other and with other sources of typological information, such as linguistic grammars. Some of these inconsistencies stem from coding errors or linguistic variation, but many of the disagreements are due to the discrete categorical nature of these databases. We shed light on this issue by systematically exploring disagreements across typological databases and resources, and their uses in NLP, covering the past and present. We next investigate the future of such work, offering an argument that a continuous view of typological features is clearly beneficial, echoing recommendations from linguistics. We propose that such a view of typology has significant potential in the future, including in language modeling in low-resource scenarios.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T The Past, Present, and Future of Typological Databases in NLP
%A Baylor, Emi
%A Ploeger, Esther
%A Bjerva, Johannes
%Y Bouamor, Houda
%Y Pino, Juan
%Y Bali, Kalika
%S Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
%D 2023
%8 December
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Singapore
%F baylor-etal-2023-past
%X Typological information has the potential to be beneficial in the development of NLP models, particularly for low-resource languages. Unfortunately, current large-scale typological databases, notably WALS and Grambank, are inconsistent both with each other and with other sources of typological information, such as linguistic grammars. Some of these inconsistencies stem from coding errors or linguistic variation, but many of the disagreements are due to the discrete categorical nature of these databases. We shed light on this issue by systematically exploring disagreements across typological databases and resources, and their uses in NLP, covering the past and present. We next investigate the future of such work, offering an argument that a continuous view of typological features is clearly beneficial, echoing recommendations from linguistics. We propose that such a view of typology has significant potential in the future, including in language modeling in low-resource scenarios.
%R 10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.82
%U https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.82
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.82
%P 1163-1169

Markdown (Informal)

[The Past, Present, and Future of Typological Databases in NLP](https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.82) (Baylor et al., Findings 2023)

• The Past, Present, and Future of Typological Databases in NLP (Baylor et al., Findings 2023)

ACL

• Emi Baylor, Esther Ploeger, and Johannes Bjerva. 2023. The Past, Present, and Future of Typological Databases in NLP. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 1163–1169, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.