Of approximately 7,000 languages around the world, only a handful have abundant computational resources. Extending the reach of language technologies to diverse, less-resourced languages is important for tackling the challenges of digital equity and inclusion. Here we introduce the Grambank typological database as a resource to support such efforts. To date, work that uses typological data to extend computational research to less-resourced languages has relied on cross-linguistic morphosyntax datasets that are sparsely populated, use categorical coding that can be difficult to interpret, and introduce redundant information across features. Grambank presents similar information (e.g. word order, grammatical relation marking, constructions like interrogatives and negation), but is designed to avoid several disadvantages of legacy typological resources. Grambank’s 195 features encode basic information about morphology and syntax for over 2,400 languages. 83% of these languages are annotated for at least 100 features. By implementing binary coding for most features and curating the dataset to avoid logical dependencies, Grambank presents information in a user-friendly format for computational applications. The scale, completeness, reliability, format, and documentation of Grambank make it a useful resource for linguistically-informed models, cross-lingual NLP, and research targeting less-resourced languages.

Grambank’s typological advances support work on less-resourced languages

While there exist scores of natural languages, each with its unique features and idiosyncrasies, they all share a unifying theme: enabling human communication. We may thus reasonably predict that human cognition shapes how these languages evolve and are used. Assuming that the capacity to process information is roughly constant across human populations, we expect a surprisal--duration trade-off to arise both across and within languages. We analyse this trade-off using a corpus of 600 languages and, after controlling for several potential confounds, we find strong supporting evidence in both settings. Specifically, we find that, on average, phones are produced faster in languages where they are less surprising, and vice versa. Further, we confirm that more surprising phones are longer, on average, in 319 languages out of the 600. We thus conclude that there is strong evidence of a surprisal--duration trade-off in operation, both across and within the world's languages.

A surprisal--duration trade-off across and within the world's languages

This work presents an information-theoretic operationalisation of cross-linguistic non-arbitrariness. It is not a new idea that there are small, cross-linguistic associations between the forms and meanings of words. For instance, it has been claimed (Blasi et al., 2016) that the word for "tongue" is more likely than chance to contain the phone [l]. By controlling for the influence of language family and geographic proximity within a very large concept-aligned, cross-lingual lexicon, we extend methods previously used to detect within language non-arbitrariness (Pimentel et al., 2019) to measure cross-linguistic associations. We find that there is a significant effect of non-arbitrariness, but it is unsurprisingly small (less than 0.5% on average according to our information-theoretic estimate). We also provide a concept-level analysis which shows that a quarter of the concepts considered in our work exhibit a significant level of cross-linguistic non-arbitrariness. In sum, the paper provides new methods to detect cross-linguistic associations at scale, and confirms their effects are minor.

Finding Concept-specific Biases in Form--Meaning Associations

The mapping of lexical meanings to wordforms is a major feature of natural languages. While usage pressures might assign short words to frequent meanings (Zipf's law of abbreviation), the need for a productive and open-ended vocabulary, local constraints on sequences of symbols, and various other factors all shape the lexicons of the world's languages. Despite their importance in shaping lexical structure, the relative contributions of these factors have not been fully quantified. Taking a coding-theoretic view of the lexicon and making use of a novel generative statistical model, we define upper bounds for the compressibility of the lexicon under various constraints. Examining corpora from 7 typologically diverse languages, we use those upper bounds to quantify the lexicon's optimality and to explore the relative costs of major constraints on natural codes. We find that (compositional) morphology and graphotactics can sufficiently account for most of the complexity of natural codes -- as measured by code length.

How (Non-)Optimal is the Lexicon?

**Organizers:** Koustava Goswami; Alexey Sorokin; Ritesh Kumar; Andrey Shcherbakov; Edoardo M. Ponti; Saliha Muradoğlu; Lisa Beinborn; Ryan Cotterell; Ekaterina Vylomova For more details, please visit our [workshop website](https://sigtyp.github.io/workshop.html)

The 5th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP (SIGTYP)

workshop paper

### Welcome to the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (EACL) 
Continuing its mission of expanding and involving the science community of all European countries, EACL had selected the Ukrainian community for the 16th EACL, which took place online due to the COVID pandemic. Unfortunately, the ongoing war made the organisation in Kyiv impossible. Considering the importance of physical interaction among researchers, especially after the restrictions imposed by the COVID pandemic, in addition to an online mode, the conference will be held in Dubrovnik, Croatia, from 2 to 6 of May, 2023. The original aim of strengthening the connection with the Ukrainian community will not change as our program will feature a dedicated session and a workshop to highlight work on Ukrainian language technologies. As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

You need to register for the conference in order to access this site. Please visit https://2023.eacl.org/registration for more information.

EACL 2023

As the flagship European conference in the field of computational linguistics, EACL welcomes European and international researchers covering a broad spectrum of research areas that are concerned with computational approaches to natural language.

**Session Chair: **Diana Inkpen 
**In Person Volunteer:** Ananya B Sai 
** Remote Volunteer:** Anastasiia Sedova

2E: Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics

technical paper

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible. The experience for on-site participants would closely approximate a normal pre-COVID *ACL conference, with 5-6 thematically organized parallel sessions and live Q/A and interactive discussion immediately after the talks. Presentations by virtual participants will be equitably interleaved with those of on-site participants, projected on the auditorium screens as if on-site, and also followed immediately by live Q/A and interactive discussion at a time during reasonable waking hours for the virtual presenter. For all participants, on-site and virtual, who are unable to attend a session due to either time-zone issues or because they are participating in another session live, talk recordings and slides will be available online at a minimum after the live presentation (and in many cases before as well), and questions may be submitted in advance on session-specific discussion boards and answered live in session with the usual visual aids if desired.

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Please Note: The EMNLP registration system is not currently connected to the underline site as we are still in the process of building out EMNLP 2021. You will receive access instructions from underline the week of November 1st. 

Access is given only to EMNLP upon registration, if you have not registered please do so [here](https://2021.emnlp.org/registration).

Registered attendees will receive access the week of November 1st.

EMNLP 2021

EMNLP 2021 is planned to be a hybrid event in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, with both on-site and fully virtual participation possible.

Virtual Poster Session II: Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics

poster

**Session Chair: ** Costanza Navarretta

12E-Oral: Linguistic Theories, Cognitive Modeling and Psycholinguistics and Phonology, Morphology and Word Segmentation

2021 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics.

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**Conference Structure**
https://2021.naacl.org/blog/conference-structure/

**Walkthrough video of how to NAACL 2021** 

Please take a moment to view this video explaining how to navigate the platform, attend sessions network with other attendees. 


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Damián Blasi

5

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Presentations

Grambank’s typological advances support work on less-resourced languages

A surprisal--duration trade-off across and within the world's languages

A surprisal--duration trade-off across and within the world's languages

Finding Concept-specific Biases in Form--Meaning Associations

How (Non-)Optimal is the Lexicon?

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