Related papers: Finding Variants for Construction-Based Dialectome…
The goal of this paper is to provide a complete representation of regional linguistic variation on a global scale. To this end, the paper focuses on removing three constraints that have previously limited work within…
Recent work has formulated the task for computational construction grammar as producing a constructicon given a corpus of usage. Previous work has evaluated these unsupervised grammars using both internal metrics (for example, Minimum…
This paper evaluates global-scale dialect identification for 14 national varieties of English as a means for studying syntactic variation. The paper makes three main contributions: (i) introducing data-driven language mapping as a method…
Construction Grammar (CxG) has recently been used as the basis for probing studies that have investigated the performance of large pretrained language models (PLMs) with respect to the structure and meaning of constructions. In this…
Several computational models have been developed to detect and analyze dialect variation in recent years. Most of these models assume a predefined set of geographical regions over which they detect and analyze dialectal variation. However,…
This paper uses the Minimum Description Length paradigm to model the complexity of CxGs (operationalized as the encoding size of a grammar) alongside their descriptive adequacy (operationalized as the encoding size of a corpus given a…
This paper analyses the degree to which dialect classifiers based on syntactic representations remain stable over space and time. While previous work has shown that the combination of grammar induction and geospatial text classification…
Dialect variation is of considerable interest in linguistics and other social sciences. However, traditionally it has been studied using proxies (transcriptions) rather than acoustic recordings directly. We introduce novel statistical…
This paper measures variation in embedding spaces which have been trained on different regional varieties of English while controlling for instability in the embeddings. While previous work has shown that it is possible to distinguish…
Construction Grammar (CxG) is a paradigm from cognitive linguistics emphasising the connection between syntax and semantics. Rather than rules that operate on lexical items, it posits constructions as the central building blocks of…
The web-scale of pretraining data has created an important evaluation challenge: to disentangle linguistic competence on cases well-represented in pretraining data from generalization to out-of-domain language, specifically the dynamic,…
In this paper, we propose methods for discovering semantic differences in words appearing in two corpora based on the norms of contextualized word vectors. The key idea is that the coverage of meanings is reflected in the norm of its mean…
While language is a complex adaptive system, most work on syntactic variation observes a few individual constructions in isolation from the rest of the grammar. This means that the grammar, a network which connects thousands of structures…
Recent work has examined language models from a linguistic perspective to better understand how they acquire language. Most existing benchmarks focus on judging grammatical acceptability, whereas the ability to interpret meanings conveyed…
This paper presents an embedding-based approach to detecting variation without relying on prior normalisation or predefined variant lists. The method trains subword embeddings on raw text and groups related forms through combined cosine and…
The study of language variation examines how language varies between and within different groups of speakers, shedding light on how we use language to construct identities and how social contexts affect language use. A common method is to…
A usage-based Construction Grammar (CxG) posits that slot-constraints generalize from common exemplar constructions. But what is the best model of constraint generalization? This paper evaluates competing frequency-based and…
Comparative constructions play an important role in natural language inference. However, attempts to study semantic representations and logical inferences for comparatives from the computational perspective are not well developed, due to…
Investigating linguistic relationships on a global scale requires analyzing diverse features such as syntax, phonology and prosody, which evolve at varying rates influenced by internal diversification, language contact, and sociolinguistic…
Temporal grounding is the task of locating a specific segment from an untrimmed video according to a query sentence. This task has achieved significant momentum in the computer vision community as it enables activity grounding beyond…