Lexical typology : a programmatic sketch

The present paper is an attempt to lay the foundation for Lexical Typology as a new kind of linguistic typology.1 The goal of Lexical Typology is to investigate crosslinguistically significant patterns of interaction between lexicon and grammar

Retrieving with good sense

Although always present in text, word sense ambiguity only recently became regarded as a problem to information retrieval which was potentially solvable. The growth of interest in word senses resulted from new directions taken in disambiguation research. This paper first outlines this research and surveys the resulting efforts in information retrieval. Although the majority of attempts to improve retrieval effectiveness were unsuccessful, much was learnt from the research. Most notably a notion of under what circumstance disambiguation may prove of use to retrieval

In search of isoglosses: continuous and discrete language embeddings in Slavic historical phonology

This paper investigates the ability of neural network architectures to effectively learn diachronic phonological generalizations in a multilingual setting. We employ models using three different types of language embedding (dense, sigmoid, and straight-through). We find that the Straight-Through model outperforms the other two in terms of accuracy, but the Sigmoid model's language embeddings show the strongest agreement with the traditional subgrouping of the Slavic languages. We find that the Straight-Through model has learned coherent, semi-interpretable information about sound change, and outline directions for future research