{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/a-probabilistic-generative-model-of","title":"A Probabilistic Generative Model of Linguistic Typology","arxiv_id":"1903.10950","date":"2019-03-26","proceeding":"NAACL 2019 6","authors":["Johannes Bjerva","Yova Kementchedjhieva","Ryan Cotterell","Isabelle Augenstein"],"abstract":"In the principles-and-parameters framework, the structural features of languages depend on parameters that may be toggled on or off, with a single parameter often dictating the status of multiple features. The implied covariance between features inspires our probabilisation of this line of linguistic inquiry---we develop a generative model of language based on exponential-family matrix factorisation. By modelling all languages and features within the same architecture, we show how structural similarities between languages can be exploited to predict typological features with near-perfect accuracy, outperforming several baselines on the task of predicting held-out features. Furthermore, we show that language embeddings pre-trained on monolingual text allow for generalisation to unobserved languages. This finding has clear practical and also theoretical implications: the results confirm what linguists have hypothesised, i.e.~that there are significant correlations between typological features and languages.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.10950v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.10950v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"a-probabilistic-generative-model-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/ufal/ST2020","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"model","task_name":"model"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}