Real-Valued Logics for Typological Universals: Framework and Application
Tillmann Dönicke, Xiang Yu, Jonas Kuhn · 2020
This paper proposes a framework for the expression of typological statements which uses realvalued logics to capture the empirical truth value (truth degree) of a formula on a given data source, e.g. a collection of multilingual treebanks with comparable annotation.The formulae can be arbitrarily complex expressions of propositional logic.To illustrate the usefulness of such a framework, we present experiments on the Universal Dependencies treebanks for two use cases: (i) empirical (re-)evaluation of established formulae against the spectrum of available treebanks and (ii) evaluating new formulae (i.e.potential candidates for universals) generated by a search algorithm.