Related papers: Global Syntactic Variation in Seven Languages: Tow…
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…
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…
This paper develops a construction-based dialectometry capable of identifying previously unknown constructions and measuring the degree to which a given construction is subject to regional variation. The central idea is to learn a grammar…
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 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…
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…
In the last few years, microblogging platforms such as Twitter have given rise to a deluge of textual data that can be used for the analysis of informal communication between millions of individuals. In this work, we propose an…
In derivational morphology, what mechanisms govern the variation in form-meaning relations between words? The answers to this type of questions are typically based on intuition and on observations drawn from limited data, even when a wide…
Quantifying differences in terminologies from various academic domains has been a longstanding problem yet to be solved. We propose a computational approach for analyzing linguistic variation among scientific research fields by capturing…
Semantics, morphology and syntax are strongly interdependent. However, the majority of computational methods for semantic change detection use distributional word representations which encode mostly semantics. We investigate an alternative…
We introduce a class of stochastic models for the dynamics of two linguistic variants that are competing to become the single, shared convention within an unstructured community of speakers. Different instances of the model are…
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…
We present a methodological framework to discover linguistic and discursive patterns associated to different social groups through contrastive synthetic text generation and statistical analysis. In contrast with previous approaches, we aim…
We present a new computational technique to detect and analyze statistically significant geographic variation in language. Our meta-analysis approach captures statistical properties of word usage across geographical regions and uses…
This paper presents a comparison of classification methods for linguistic typology for the purpose of expanding an extensive, but sparse language resource: the World Atlas of Language Structures (WALS) (Dryer and Haspelmath, 2013). We…
A core part of linguistic typology is the classification of languages according to linguistic properties, such as those detailed in the World Atlas of Language Structure (WALS). Doing this manually is prohibitively time-consuming, which is…
Distributional semantics provides multi-dimensional, graded, empirically induced word representations that successfully capture many aspects of meaning in natural languages, as shown in a large body of work in computational linguistics;…
We propose a new computational approach for tracking and detecting statistically significant linguistic shifts in the meaning and usage of words. Such linguistic shifts are especially prevalent on the Internet, where the rapid exchange of…
This paper maps the large-scale variation of the Spanish language by employing a corpus based on geographically tagged Twitter messages. Lexical dialects are extracted from an analysis of variants of tens of concepts. The resulting maps…
Alignment with high-resource standard languages is often assumed to aid the modeling of related low-resource varieties. We challenge this assumption by demonstrating that excessive representational entanglement with a dominant variety, such…