Compiling the Uralic Dataset for NorthEuraLex, a Lexicostatistical Database of Northern Eurasia

This paper presents a large comparative lexical database which covers about a thousand concepts across twenty Uralic languages. The dataset will be released as the first part of NorthEuraLex, a lexicostatistical database of Northern Eurasia which is being compiled within the EVOLAEMP project. The chief purpose of the lexical database is to serve as a basis of benchmarks for different tasks within computational historical linguistics, but it might also be valuable to researchers who work on the application of computational methods to open research questions within the language family. The paper describes and motivates the decisions taken concerning data collection methodology, also discussing some of the problems involved in compiling and unifying data from lexical resources in six different gloss languages. The dataset is already publicly available in various PDF formats for inspection and review, and is scheduled for release in machine-readable form in early 2015.