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. 2020;54(1):273-301.
doi: 10.1007/s10579-019-09480-6. Epub 2019 Nov 30.

NorthEuraLex: a wide-coverage lexical database of Northern Eurasia

Johannes Dellert  1 , Thora Daneyko  1 , Alla Münch  1 , Alina Ladygina  1 , Armin Buch  1 , Natalie Clarius  1 , Ilja Grigorjew  1 , Mohamed Balabel  1 , Hizniye Isabella Boga  1 , Zalina Baysarova  1 , Roland Mühlenbernd  1 , Johannes Wahle  1 , Gerhard Jäger  1
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NorthEuraLex: a wide-coverage lexical database of Northern Eurasia

Johannes Dellert et al. Lang Resour Eval. 2020.

Abstract

This article describes the first release version of a new lexicostatistical database of Northern Eurasia, which includes Europe as the most well-researched linguistic area. Unlike in other areas of the world, where databases are restricted to covering a small number of concepts as far as possible based on often sparse documentation, good lexical resources providing wide coverage of the lexicon are available even for many smaller languages in our target area. This makes it possible to attain near-completeness for a substantial number of concepts. The resulting database provides a basis for rich benchmarks that can be used to test automated methods which aim to derive new knowledge about language history in underresearched areas.

Keywords: Caucasian languages; Indo-European languages; Lexical database; Northern Eurasia; Siberian languages; Turkic languages; Uralic languages.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Map of languages in NorthEuraLex 0.9 (except Eskimo-Aleut). Each language family is encoded by a different combination of color and shape. (Color figure online)
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
Data collection and processing workflow for NorthEuraLex 0.9. Green nodes represent our sources of information, yellow nodes stand for informal auxiliary files, and orange nodes represent data files in machine-readable standardized formats. (Color figure online)
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
Sample of words for ‘rainbow’ in the web interface
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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