LLM agents help analyze language structures faster and more widely
LLM Agents as Computational Typologists
Computation and Language
Summary
Studying how languages differ is hard and takes a lot of expert work. The authors created AUTOTYPOLOGIST, a language model agent that can read grammar books and examples to find patterns in many languages. It checks facts carefully and uses step-by-step reasoning to understand complex language features. While it does well when it has full grammar texts, it struggles with just raw language examples and still needs experts to double-check its findings.
What this means in practice
- •For language technology developers: Automate extraction of language structure features from grammar texts for faster development of multilingual tools.
- •For computational linguists: Assist in testing and refining universal language hypotheses by synthesizing evidence across multiple languages.
Authors
Changbing Yang, Christopher Hammerly, Freda Shi, Jian Zhu
Abstract
Linguistic typology relies on expert analysis of reference grammars across languages, making large-scale crosslinguistic comparison labor-intensive and unscalable. We introduce AUTOTYPOLOGIST, an LLM agent for evidence-grounded typological analysis over reference grammars. The agent is capable of retrieving relevant grammar sections, analyzing interlinear glossed text (IGT), and iteratively reasoning over typological hypotheses using a ReAct-style workflow. We evaluate the system on TYPOLOGICAL FEATURE CODING against expert annotations and TYPOLOGICAL HYPOTHESIS TESTING with typological universals using 25 open-source reference grammars. Operating under different information constraints in TYPOLOGICAL FEATURE CODING, the agent can synthesize information from reference grammar prose but still faces challenges with only IGTs in the target language. In TYPOLOGICAL HYPOTHESIS TESTING, the agent can synthesize crosslinguistic evidence and identify both supporting cases and counterexamples. These findings suggest that LLM agents can support scalable and inspectable typological analysis, while still requiring expert validation.