{"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/modeling-color-terminology-across-thousands","title":"Modeling Color Terminology Across Thousands of Languages","arxiv_id":"1910.01531","date":"2019-10-03","proceeding":"IJCNLP 2019 11","authors":["Arya D. McCarthy","Winston Wu","Aaron Mueller","Bill Watson","David Yarowsky"],"abstract":"There is an extensive history of scholarship into what constitutes a \"basic\" color term, as well as a broadly attested acquisition sequence of basic color terms across many languages, as articulated in the seminal work of Berlin and Kay (1969). This paper employs a set of diverse measures on massively cross-linguistic data to operationalize and critique the Berlin and Kay color term hypotheses. Collectively, the 14 empirically-grounded computational linguistic metrics we design---as well as their aggregation---correlate strongly with both the Berlin and Kay basic/secondary color term partition (gamma=0.96) and their hypothesized universal acquisition sequence. The measures and result provide further empirical evidence from computational linguistics in support of their claims, as well as additional nuance: they suggest treating the partition as a spectrum instead of a dichotomy.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01531v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.01531v1.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":"modeling-color-terminology-across-thousands","repo_url":"https://github.com/aryamccarthy/basic-color-terms","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}