Article published in:
Language Processing and Grammars: The role of functionally oriented computational models
Edited by Brian Nolan and Carlos Periñán-Pascual
[Studies in Language Companion Series 150] 2014
► pp. 13–38

From the extraction of continuous features in parallel texts to visual analytics of heterogeneous areal-typological datasets

| Philips University Marburg
| Stockholm University
| University of Konstanz
| University of Konstanz
The aim of this paper is twofold. First, we show that functionally motivated procedural approaches may help to automatically extract typological features from texts. This idea is illustrated with measuring cross-linguistic variation in the domain of morphological typology based on parallel texts. Second, we demonstrate that the methodology developed in the field of visual analytics allows for detecting patterns or regularities in the automatically extracted features. At the heart of our approach lies an extended sunburst visualization, which enables a cross-comparison of a large number of features within the context of language genealogy and areal information. We provide evidence of the usefulness of the present approach with case studies where the visualizations of the extracted features reveal interesting insights.
Published online: 01 April 2014
https://doi.org/10.1075/slcs.150.02may
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