This paper presents a comparison of classification methods for linguistic typology for the purpose of expanding an extensive, but sparse language resource: the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) (Dryer and Haspelmath, 2013). We experimented with a variety of regression and nearest-neighbor methods for use in classification over a set of 325 languages and six syntactic rules drawn from WALS. To classify each rule, we consider the typological features of the other five rules; linguistic features extracted from a word-aligned Bible in each language; and genealogical features (genus and family) of each language. In general, we find that propagating the majority label among all languages of the same genus achieves the best accuracy in label pre- diction. Following this, a logistic regression model that combines typological and linguistic features offers the next best performance. Interestingly, this model actually outperforms the majority labels among all languages of the same family.
Apart from typology, the data from WALS have also been used in natural language processing to advance several core NLP tasks. @cite_15 used language similarity information to improve multilingual parsing by defined a distance metric over WALS rules. The authors considered six WALS rules to create their similarity metric, three of which (85A, 86A, and 88A), are also used in this study.
@cite_15
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The recent availability of typological databases such as World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) has spurred investigations regarding its utility for classifying the world’s languages, the stability of typological features in genetic linguistics and typological universals across the language families of the world. In this paper, we compare typological distances, derived from fifteen vector similarity measures, with family internal classifications and also lexical divergence. These results are only a first step towards the use of WALS database in the projection of NLP resources and bootstrapping NLP tools for typologically or genetically similar, yet resource-poor languages. Metric learning aims at finding a distance that approximates a task-specific notion of semantic similarity. Typically, a Mahalanobis distance is learned from pairs of data labeled as being semantically similar or not. In this paper, we learn such metrics in a weakly supervised setting where "bags" of instances are labeled with "bags" of labels. We formulate the problem as a multiple instance learning (MIL) problem over pairs of bags. If two bags share at least one label, we label the pair positive, and negative otherwise. We propose to learn a metric using those labeled pairs of bags, leading to MildML, for multiple instance logistic discriminant metric learning. MildML iterates between updates of the metric and selection of putative positive pairs of examples from positive pairs of bags. To evaluate our approach, we introduce a large and challenging data set, Labeled Yahoo! News, which we have manually annotated and contains 31147 detected faces of 5873 different people in 20071 images. We group the faces detected in an image into a bag, and group the names detected in the caption into a corresponding set of labels. When the labels come from manual annotation, we find that MildML using the bag-level annotation performs as well as fully supervised metric learning using instance-level annotation. We also consider performance in the case of automatically extracted labels for the bags, where some of the bag labels do not correspond to any example in the bag. In this case MildML works substantially better than relying on noisy instance-level annotations derived from the bag-level annotation by resolving face-name associations in images with their captions. We introduce an approach to learn discriminative visual representations while exploiting external semantic knowledge about object category relationships. Given a hierarchical taxonomy that captures semantic similarity between the objects, we learn a corresponding tree of metrics (ToM). In this tree, we have one metric for each non-leaf node of the object hierarchy, and each metric is responsible for discriminating among its immediate subcategory children. Specifically, a Mahalanobis metric learned for a given node must satisfy the appropriate (dis)similarity constraints generated only among its subtree members' training instances. To further exploit the semantics, we introduce a novel regularizer coupling the metrics that prefers a sparse disjoint set of features to be selected for each metric relative to its ancestor (supercategory) nodes' metrics. Intuitively, this reflects that visual cues most useful to distinguish the generic classes (e.g., feline vs. canine) should be different than those cues most useful to distinguish their component fine-grained classes (e.g., Persian cat vs. Siamese cat). We validate our approach with multiple image datasets using the WordNet taxonomy, show its advantages over alternative metric learning approaches, and analyze the meaning of attribute features selected by our algorithm. Research has seen considerable achievements concerning translation of natural language patterns into formal queries for Question Answering (QA) based on Knowledge Graphs (KG). One of the main challenges in this research area is about how to identify which property within a Knowledge Graph matches the predicate found in a Natural Language (NL) relation. Current approaches for formal query generation attempt to resolve this problem mainly by first retrieving the named entity from the KG together with a list of its predicates, then filtering out one from all the predicates of the entity. We attempt an approach to directly match an NL predicate to KG properties that can be employed within QA pipelines. In this paper, we specify a systematic approach as well as providing a tool that can be employed to solve this task. Our approach models KB relations with their underlying parts of speech, we then enhance this with extra attributes obtained from Wordnet and Dependency parsing characteristics. From a question, we model a similar representation of query relations. We then define distance measurements between the query relation and the properties representations from the KG to identify which property is referred to by the relation within the query. We report substantive recall values and considerable precision from our evaluation.