Advancing the Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications with New Workflows and Data (2025)

Abstract: Lexical resources are crucial for cross-linguistic analysis and can provide new insights into computational models for natural language learning. Here, we present an advanced database for comparative studies of words with multiple meanings, a phenomenon known as colexification. The new version includes improvements in the handling, selection and presentation of the data. We compare the new database with previous versions and find that our improvements provide a more balanced sample covering more language families worldwide, with enhanced data quality, given that all word forms are provided in phonetic transcription. We conclude that the new Database of Cross-Linguistic Colexifications has the potential to inspire exciting new studies that link cross-linguistic data to open questions in linguistic typology, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics.

## introduction the database of cross-linguistic colexifications (clics, https://clics.clld.org , @xcite offers detailed data on the distribution and frequency of colexifications across several thousand languages. colexification is a cover term that unifies the notions of polysemy, homophony, and underspecification, referring to cases where a single word form in a given language expresses multiple senses @xcite . for example, vietnamese xanh refers to 'blue' and 'green' at the same time, german böse means both 'angry' and 'evil', or english ear refers to a part of the body or a part of a grain. the different examples represent words with multiple senses and can be labeled as underspecification (vietnamese), polysemy (german), or homophony (english), but they can also be taken together as examples of the phenomenon of colexification. clics has built on this idea by collecting data from multilingual word lists that were unified with respect to the semantic glosses by which words across different languages are elicited. from these word lists, colexifications were automatically extracted, forming a large colexification network @xcite that can be investigated interactively @xcite . the database has improved concerning the workflow by which data are aggregated and in terms of the number of datasets underlying the database (4 datasets in version 1.0, @xcite datasets in version 2.0, @xcite datasets in version 3.0 @xcite ). in its current form, the clics database is characterized by three major features. first, clics aggregates data from existing standardized datasets, rather than curating data directly. second, clics offers its data in both machine-and humanreadable form, allowing scholars to access the data in computational workflows as well as through the web interface. third, clics is open, and both the individual data and the source code are published with permissive licenses, allowing scholars not only to investigate the database, but also to extend it with additional content or methods. given that five years have passed since the last official release of clics and that new relevant datasets have been published during this time, mainly as part of lexibank, a large repository for standardized multilingual word lists ( https://lexibank.clld.org , @xcite , it is time to improve the database even further. taking advantage of the fact that clics is open and free to modification, we therefore present an updated version of the clics database, which we named clics 4 for convenience. clics 4 not only increases the underlying data, but also addresses three major shortcomings of the previous versions of clics by improving (1) the handling of concepts ( § 3.2), (2) the selection of languages to be included in the colexification database ( § 3.3), and (3) the general representation of data ( § 3.4). in the following, we will present previous studies devoted to cross-linguistic colexifications ( § 2.1), discuss the improvements in more detail ( § 3), illustrate their consequences for clics 4 ( § 4), and reflect on the future of cross-linguistic colexification data ( § 5). ## materials and methods in the following, we will introduce all necessary steps that lead to the creation of our modified clics 4 database. we followed the established workflow for data aggregation used in clics 3 to some extent ( § 2.2). however, we present a drastic increase of data based on standardized datasets ( § 3.1), introduce an improved handling of concepts during data aggregation ( § 3.2), refine the selection of languages and concepts ( § 3.3), and make the representation of the colexification data more transparent ( § 3.4). ## conclusion and outlook we presented clics 4, an enhanced version of the cross-linguistic colexification database, which integrates lexical data for 3,432 language varieties, corresponding to 2,152 distinct glottocodes. when creating clics 4 we used an advanced workflow for the aggregation and analysis of cross-linguistic colexification data that is based on an increased and improved data basis, an improved handling of concepts, more fine-grained criteria for the selection of languages and concepts, and an updated representation of the colexification data. in contrast to previous colexification databases, clics 4 determines colexifications exclusively based on phonetic transcriptions. this makes the data more consistent and robust and opens new possibilities to analyze the data in comparative studies. due to the phonetic transcriptions in clics 4, future studies can build on the initial work to infer and investigate partial colexifications @xcite @xcite . in addition, phonetic transcriptions enable scholars to carry out more fine-grained analyses of colexifications inside specific language families, where a handling of cognate words is important to identify colexifications that have evolved independently from colexifications that have been inherited across branches @xcite . future studies can use clics 4 to explore the relationship between words and their meanings across a wide range of languages and uncover important insights into language evolution, cultural variations, and cognitive principles. in this way, clics 4 has great potential to contribute to future studies that address open questions in a broad range of linguistic subfields, including linguistic typology, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computational linguistics.