URIEL+: Enhancing Linguistic Inclusion and Usability in a Typological and Multilingual Knowledge Base
Aditya Khan, Mason Shipton, David Anugraha, Kaiyao Duan, Phuong H. Hoang, Eric Khiu, A. Seza Doğruöz, En-Shiun 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.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{khan-etal-2025-uriel,
title = "{URIEL}+: Enhancing Linguistic Inclusion and Usability in a Typological and Multilingual Knowledge Base",
author = {Khan, Aditya and
Shipton, Mason and
Anugraha, David and
Duan, Kaiyao and
Hoang, Phuong H. and
Khiu, Eric and
Do{\u{g}}ru{\"o}z, A. Seza and
Lee, En-Shiun Annie},
editor = "Rambow, Owen and
Wanner, Leo and
Apidianaki, Marianna and
Al-Khalifa, Hend and
Eugenio, Barbara Di and
Schockaert, Steven",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics",
month = jan,
year = "2025",
address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.463/",
pages = "6937--6952"
}