Skip to content

Are precomputed URIEL+ distance matrices available anywhere? #11

Description

@rmaacario

Thanks for URIEL+ — the expanded coverage is exactly what I need. I work on Nheengatu (yrl / nhen1239), a Tupi-Guarani language of the Brazilian Amazon, and Grambank gives it 183 observed syntactic features where the original URIEL had none.

Environment: urielplus 1.2, Python 3.10, macOS on Apple silicon, 24 GB RAM.

Three questions.

1. Precomputed distances. lang2vec distributes a precomputed distances.zip, so l2v.distance("syntactic", "por", "yrl") is instant. URIEL+ seems to require running integrate_databases() plus imputation locally. Here integrate_glottolog has been running for over 30 minutes at ~5.5 GB RSS: it adds the language and dialect codes from dialects.csv (26,879 distinct codes across the two code columns) to the 7,970 already present, then recomputes the phylogeny, geocoord and scriptural vectors — all before softimpute even starts.

Is there a precomputed distance file we could download instead? If not, would you consider publishing one?

2. Two data files missing from the PyPI package.pip install urielplus (v1.2) installs without duplicate_feature_sets.json and resource_languages.json, so integrate_databases() fails with:

FileNotFoundError: .../urielplus/database/urielplus_csvs/duplicate_feature_sets.json

Copying both from the repo fixes it. Looks like a MANIFEST.in issue.

3. Genetic distance for sparse family vectors. In the original URIEL, genetic_distance("grn", "gug") returns 1.0, though both are Guarani (macrolanguage and Paraguayan variety). grnyrl is also 1.0, while tpnyrl (Tupinamba–Nheengatu) is a sensible 0.25. The grn family vector has only 2 active branches out of 3,718. Does URIEL+ correct this? I ask because I plan to use a Tupi-Guarani language as a genealogical control.

Happy to send a PR for the missing data files if useful.

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions