URIEL+: Enhancing Linguistic Inclusion and Usability in a Typological and Multilingual Knowledge Base

Aditya Armaan Khan, Mason Stephen Shipton, David Anugraha, Kaiyao Duan, Phuong H. Hoang, Eric Khiu, A. Seza Doğruöz, Annie Lee


Abstract
URIEL is a knowledge base offering geographical, phylogenetic, and typological vector representations for 7970 languages. It includes distance measures between these vectors for 4005 languages, which are accessible via the lang2vec tool. Despite being frequently cited, URIEL is limited in terms of linguistic inclusion and overall usability. To tackle these challenges, we introduce URIEL+, an enhanced version of URIEL and lang2vec that addresses these limitations. In addition to expanding typological feature coverage for 2898 languages, URIEL+ improves the user experience with robust, customizable distance calculations to better suit the needs of users. These upgrades also offer competitive performance on downstream tasks and provide distances that better align with linguistic distance studies.
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.463
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6937–6952
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.463/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Aditya Armaan Khan, Mason Stephen Shipton, David Anugraha, Kaiyao Duan, Phuong H. Hoang, Eric Khiu, A. Seza Doğruöz, and Annie Lee. 2025. URIEL+: Enhancing Linguistic Inclusion and Usability in a Typological and Multilingual Knowledge Base. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 6937–6952, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
URIEL+: Enhancing Linguistic Inclusion and Usability in a Typological and Multilingual Knowledge Base (Khan et al., COLING 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.463.pdf