Modeling Color Terminology Across Thousands of Languages

Autor:	McCarthy, Arya D., Wu, Winston, Mueller, Aaron, Watson, Bill, Yarowsky, David
Rok vydání:	2019
Předmět:	Computer Science - Computation and Language
Druh dokumentu:	Working Paper
Popis:	There is an extensive history of scholarship into what constitutes a "basic" color term, as well as a broadly attested acquisition sequence of basic color terms across many languages, as articulated in the seminal work of Berlin and Kay (1969). This paper employs a set of diverse measures on massively cross-linguistic data to operationalize and critique the Berlin and Kay color term hypotheses. Collectively, the 14 empirically-grounded computational linguistic metrics we design---as well as their aggregation---correlate strongly with both the Berlin and Kay basic/secondary color term partition (gamma=0.96) and their hypothesized universal acquisition sequence. The measures and result provide further empirical evidence from computational linguistics in support of their claims, as well as additional nuance: they suggest treating the partition as a spectrum instead of a dichotomy. Comment: Accepted for presentation at EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019
Databáze:	arXiv
Externí odkaz:	http://arxiv.org/abs/1910.01531 Zobrazit plný text záznamu View this record from Arxiv