New Paper from IWCS in Düsseldorf Published

Our paper presenting the CLICS⁴ database, that we released this year, has now been published as part of the IWCS conference in Düsseldorf. The study, by Annika Tjuka, Robert Forkel, Christoph Rzymski, and myself presents new innovations that we introduced along with the fourth installment of the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexificaitons (paper available in open access, see this URL).

Lexical resources are crucial for cross-linguistic analysis and can provide new insights into computational models for natural language learning. Here, we present an advanced database for comparative studies of words with multiple meanings, a phenomenon known as colexification. The new version includes improvements in the handling, selection and presentation of the data. We compare the new database with previous versions and find that our improvements provide a more balanced sample covering more language families worldwide, with enhanced data quality, given that all word forms are provided in phonetic transcription. We conclude that the new Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications has the potential to inspire exciting new studies that link cross-linguistic data to open questions in linguistic typology, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics.