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

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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.