Related papers: Register Variation Remains Stable Across 60 Langua…
This paper experiments with frequency-based corpus similarity measures across 39 languages using a register prediction task. The goal is to quantify (i) the distance between different corpora from the same language and (ii) the homogeneity…
Word embeddings are powerful representations that form the foundation of many natural language processing architectures, both in English and in other languages. To gain further insight into word embeddings, we explore their stability (e.g.,…
This paper measures the impact of increased exposure on whether learned construction grammars converge onto shared representations when trained on data from different registers. Register influences the frequency of constructions, with some…
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 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…
The recent dramatic increase in online data availability has allowed researchers to explore human culture with unprecedented detail, such as the growth and diversification of language. In particular, it provides statistical tools to explore…
Much previous work characterizing language variation across Internet social groups has focused on the types of words used by these groups. We extend this type of study by employing BERT to characterize variation in the senses of words as…
The study of register in computational language research has historically been divided into register analysis, seeking to determine the registerial character of a text or corpus, and register synthesis, seeking to generate a text in a…
Understanding the impact of digital platforms on user behavior presents foundational challenges, including issues related to polarization, misinformation dynamics, and variation in news consumption. Comparative analyses across platforms and…
This paper measures similarity both within and between 84 language varieties across nine languages. These corpora are drawn from digital sources (the web and tweets), allowing us to evaluate whether such geo-referenced corpora are reliable…
Languages vary considerably in syntactic structure. About 40% of the world's languages have subject-verb-object order, and about 40% have subject-object-verb order. Extensive work has sought to explain this word order variation across…
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…
Chatbots are often designed to mimic social roles attributed to humans. However, little is known about the impact on user's perceptions of using language that fails to conform to the associated social role. Our research draws on…
Cultural diversity encoded within languages of the world is at risk, as many languages have become endangered in the last decades in a context of growing globalization. To preserve this diversity, it is first necessary to understand what…
The processes leading to change in languages are manifold. In order to reduce ambiguity in the transmission of information, agreement on a set of conventions for recurring problems is favored. In addition to that, speakers tend to use…
Using human evaluation of 100,000 words spread across 24 corpora in 10 languages diverse in origin and culture, we present evidence of a deep imprint of human sociality in language, observing that (1) the words of natural human language…
We introduce a framework for quantifying semantic variation of common words in Communities of Practice and in sets of topic-related communities. We show that while some meaning shifts are shared across related communities, others are…
We explore cross-lingual transfer of register classification for web documents. Registers, that is, text varieties such as blogs or news are one of the primary predictors of linguistic variation and thus affect the automatic processing of…
This paper explores the extent to which regular expressions (regexes) are portable across programming languages. Many languages offer similar regex syntaxes, and it would be natural to assume that regexes can be ported across language…
Register automata are finite automata equipped with a finite set of registers ranging over the domain of some relational structure like $(\mathbb N;=)$ or $(\mathbb Q;<)$. Register automata process words over the domain, and along a run of…