The EMDOT approach is attractive for several reasons: It is consistent for training and testing (the equivalence between the ground distance c = L 2 2 and cosine dissimilarity), compatible with the orthogonal constraint, mathematically sound (without much assumption and approximation), guaranteed to converge, almost hyperparameter free, and fast in speed (the alternating subprograms have either effective approximate solvers or closed-form solutions).
the typology dissimilarity is computed from features in the WALS database (Dryer and Haspelmath, 2013).