2023/02/01 by Johann‐Mattis List, List, Johann-Mattis
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Artificial intelligence #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Computer science #Construct (python library) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Inference #Language and cultural evolution #Natural Language Processing Techniques #Operationalization #Partial evaluation #Programming language #Theoretical computer science #Topic Modeling #Workflow
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2302.00739
openalex publication_date 2023/02/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The past years have seen a drastic rise in studies devoted to the investigation of colexification patterns in individual languages families in particular and the languages of the world in specific. Specifically computational studies have profited from the fact that colexification as a scientific construct is easy to operationalize, enabling scholars to infer colexification patterns for large collections of cross-linguistic data. Studies devoted to partial colexifications -- colexification patterns that do not involve entire words, but rather various parts of words--, however, have been rarely conducted so far. This is not surprising, since partial colexifications are less easy to deal with in computational approaches and may easily suffer from all kinds of noise resulting from false positive matches. In order to address this problem, this study proposes new approaches to the handling of partial colexifications by (1) proposing new models with which partial colexification patterns can be represented, (2) developing new efficient methods and workflows which help to infer various types of partial colexification patterns from multilingual wordlists, and (3) illustrating how inferred patterns of partial colexifications can be computationally analyzed and interactively visualized.