How Good are Typological Distances for Determining Genealogical Relationships among Languages?

The recent availability of typological databases such as World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) has spurred investigations regarding their utility for language classification, the stability of typological features in genetic linguistics and typological universals across the language families of the world. Existing work on building NLP resources such as parallel corpora, treebanks for under-resourced languages has a lot to gain by taking into consideration insights about inter-language relationships. Since Yarowsky et al. (2001), there have been a number of attempts to create resources for resource-poor languages by projecting information from resource-rich languages using comparable corpora. An important intuition in such work is that syntactic information can be transferred with higher accuracy between languages if they are similar. In this paper, we compare typological distances derived from fifteen vector similarity measures with family internal classifications and also lexical divergence. These results are only a first step towards the use of WALS database in the projection of NLP resources for typologically or genetically similar, yet resource-poor languages.