# Using Linguistic Typology to Enrich Multilingual Lexicons: the Case of Lexical Gaps in Kinship

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.05049 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05049/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 13 of its 57 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 11 Apr 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1609.08144/) (2016)
- [Unsupervised Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.11041/) (2017)
- [Modeling Language Variation and Universals: A Survey on Typological Linguistics for Natural Language Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.00914/) (2018)
- [Many Languages, One Parser](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1602.01595/) (2016)
- [A surprisal--duration trade-off across and within the world's languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.15000/) (2021)
- [On the Complexity and Typology of Inflectional Morphological Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.02747/) (2018)
- [SIGTYP 2020 Shared Task: Prediction of Typological Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.08246/) (2020)
- [A Corpus for Large-Scale Phonetic Typology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13962/) (2020)
- [Language Diversity: Visible to Humans, Exploitable by Machines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04723/) (2022)
- [Computational historical linguistics and language diversity in South Asia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12524/) (2022)
- [Modeling Color Terminology Across Thousands of Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01531/) (2019)
- [Bhasacitra: Visualising the dialect geography of South Asia](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14082/) (2021)
- [Classifying concepts via visual properties](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09422/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [State-of-the-art generalisation research in NLP: A taxonomy and review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03050/) (2022)
- [Towards Bridging the Digital Language Divide](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13405/) (2023)
- [Representing Interlingual Meaning in Lexical Databases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.09169/) (2023)
- [Diversity and Language Technology: How Techno-Linguistic Bias Can Cause Epistemic Injustice](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13714/) (2023)
- [Lexical Diversity in Kinship Across Languages and Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.13056/) (2023)
- [Crowdsourcing Lexical Diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.23133/) (2024)
- [Discovering Lexical Gaps Using Embeddings from Multilingual LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24310/) (2026)
- [Plurification in/of language technology -- The integration of culture in next-generation AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.22097/) (2026)
- [Recognized but Not Produced: A Generation Benchmark for Culturally Specific Kinship Terms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.26942/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper describes a method to enrich lexical resources with content relating to linguistic diversity, based on knowledge from the field of lexical typology. We capture the phenomenon of diversity through the notions of lexical gap and language-specific word and use a systematic method to infer gaps semi-automatically on a large scale. As a first result obtained for the domain of kinship terminology, known to be very diverse throughout the world, we publish a lexico-semantic resource consisting of 198 domain concepts, 1,911 words, and 37,370 gaps covering 699 languages. We see potential in the use of resources such as ours for the improvement of a variety of cross-lingual NLP tasks, which we demonstrate through a downstream application for the evaluation of machine translation systems.