Dissecting Treebanks to Uncover Typological Trends. A Multilingual Comparative Approach

Over the last years, linguistic typology started attracting the interest of the community working on cross- and multi-lingual NLP as a way to tackle the bottleneck deriving from the lack of annotated data for many languages. Typological information is mostly acquired from publicly accessible typological databases, manually constructed by linguists. As reported in Ponti et al. (2018), despite the abundant information contained in them for many languages, these resources suffer from two main shortcomings, i.e. their limited coverage and the discrete nature of features (only "the majority value rather than the full range of possible values and their corresponding frequencies" is reported). Corpus-based studies can help to automatically acquire quantitative typological evidence which might be exploited for polyglot NLP. Recently, the availability of corpora annotated following a cross-linguistically consistent annotation scheme such as the one developed in the Universal Dependencies project is prompting new comparative linguistic studies aimed to identify similarities as well as idiosyncrasies among typologically different languages (Nivre, 2015). The line of research described here is aimed at acquiring quantitative typological evidence from UD treebanks through a multilingual contrastive approach.