  Lexical semantic typology has identified important cross-linguistic
generalizations about the variation and commonalities in polysemy
patterns---how languages package up meanings into words. Recent computational
research has enabled investigation of lexical semantics at a much larger scale,
but little work has explored lexical typology across semantic domains, nor the
factors that influence cross-linguistic similarities. We present a novel
computational framework that quantifies semantic affinity, the cross-linguistic
similarity of lexical semantics for a concept. Our approach defines a common
multilingual semantic space that enables a direct comparison of the lexical
expression of concepts across languages. We validate our framework against
empirical findings on lexical semantic typology at both the concept and domain
levels. Our results reveal an intricate interaction between semantic domains
and extra-linguistic factors, beyond language phylogeny, that co-shape the
typology of polysemy across languages.
