A Crosslingual Investigation of Conceptualization in 1335 Languages

• Main Authors: Liu, Yihong, Ye, Haotian, Weissweiler, Leonie, Wicke, Philipp, Pei, Renhao, Zangenfeind, Robert, Schütze, Hinrich
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 15-05-2023
• Subjects: Computer Science - Computation and Language
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2305.08475

Languages differ in how they divide up the world into concepts and words;
e.g., in contrast to English, Swahili has a single concept for `belly' and
`womb'. We investigate these differences in conceptualization across 1,335
languages by aligning concepts in a parallel corpus. To this end, we propose
Conceptualizer, a method that creates a bipartite directed alignment graph
between source language concepts and sets of target language strings. In a
detailed linguistic analysis across all languages for one concept (`bird') and
an evaluation on gold standard data for 32 Swadesh concepts, we show that
Conceptualizer has good alignment accuracy. We demonstrate the potential of
research on conceptualization in NLP with two experiments. (1) We define
crosslingual stability of a concept as the degree to which it has 1-1
correspondences across languages, and show that concreteness predicts
stability. (2) We represent each language by its conceptualization pattern for
83 concepts, and define a similarity measure on these representations. The
resulting measure for the conceptual similarity of two languages is
complementary to standard genealogical, typological, and surface similarity
measures. For four out of six language families, we can assign languages to
their correct family based on conceptual similarity with accuracy between 54%
and 87%.