{"ID":2866597,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20129","arxiv_id":"2509.20129","title":"Less is More: The Effectiveness of Compact Typological Language Representations","abstract":"Linguistic feature datasets such as URIEL+ are valuable for modelling cross-lingual relationships, but their high dimensionality and sparsity, especially for low-resource languages, limit the effectiveness of distance metrics. We propose a pipeline to optimize the URIEL+ typological feature space by combining feature selection and imputation, producing compact yet interpretable typological representations. We evaluate these feature subsets on linguistic distance alignment and downstream tasks, demonstrating that reduced-size representations of language typology can yield more informative distance metrics and improve performance in multilingual NLP applications.","short_abstract":"Linguistic feature datasets such as URIEL+ are valuable for modelling cross-lingual relationships, but their high dimensionality and sparsity, especially for low-resource languages, limit the effectiveness of distance metrics. We propose a pipeline to optimize the URIEL+ typological feature space by combining feature s...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20129","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.20129v1","authors":"[\"York Hay Ng\",\"Phuong Hanh Hoang\",\"En-Shiun Annie Lee\"]","published":"2025-09-24T13:55:56Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\"]","methods":"[]","has_code":false}