Past, Present, Future: A Computational Investigation of the Typology of Tense in 1000 Languages

AbstractWe present SuperPivot, an analysis method for low-resource languages that occur in a superparallel corpus, i.e., in a corpus that contains an order of magnitude more languages than parallel corpora currently in use. We show that SuperPivot performs well for the crosslingual analysis of the linguistic phenomenon of tense. We produce analysis results for more than 1000 languages, conducting – to the best of our knowledge – the largest crosslingual computational study performed to date. We extend existing methodology for leveraging parallel corpora for typological analysis by overcoming a limiting assumption of earlier work: We only require that a linguistic feature is overtly marked in a few of thousands of languages as opposed to requiring that it be marked in all languages under investigation.