Related papers: Exploring language relations through syntactic dis…
Word embeddings provide an unsupervised way to understand differences in word usage between discursive communities. A number of recent papers have focused on identifying words that are used differently by two or more communities. But word…
Methods and insights from statistical physics are finding an increasing variety of applications where one seeks to understand the emergent properties of a complex interacting system. One such area concerns the dynamics of language at a…
Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…
This thesis investigates geographic dialect alignment in place-informed social media communities, focussing on New Zealand-related Reddit communities. By integrating qualitative analyses of user perceptions with computational methods, the…
Cross-lingual transfer is a popular approach to increase the amount of training data for NLP tasks in a low-resource context. However, the best strategy to decide which cross-lingual data to include is unclear. Prior research often focuses…
In this article we propose a novel method to estimate the frequency distribution of linguistic variables while controlling for statistical non-independence due to shared ancestry. Unlike previous approaches, our technique uses all available…
Language is highly structured, with syntactic and semantic structures, to some extent, agreed upon by speakers of the same language. With implicit or explicit awareness of such structures, humans can learn and use language efficiently and…
Lexical Similarity (LS) between two languages uncovers many interesting linguistic insights such as genetic relationship, mutual intelligibility, and the usage of one's vocabulary into other. There are various methods through which LS is…
This work proposes a tentative model for the calculation of dimensionless distances between phonemes; sounds are described with binary distinctive features and distances show linear consistency in terms of such features. The model can be…
Languages are known to describe the world in diverse ways. Across lexicons, diversity is pervasive, appearing through phenomena such as lexical gaps and untranslatability. However, in computational resources, such as multilingual lexical…
Dialect groupings can be discovered objectively and automatically by cluster analysis of phonetic transcriptions such as those found in a linguistic atlas. The first step in the analysis, the computation of linguistic distance between each…
Language typology databases enhance multi-lingual Natural Language Processing (NLP) by improving model adaptability to diverse linguistic structures. The widely-used lang2vec toolkit integrates several such databases, but its coverage…
In many applications of natural language processing (NLP) it is necessary to determine the likelihood of a given word combination. For example, a speech recognizer may need to determine which of the two word combinations ``eat a peach'' and…
Words and phrases acquire meaning from the way they are used in society, from their relative semantics to other words and phrases. For computers the equivalent of `society' is `database,' and the equivalent of `use' is `way to search the…
The automatic classification of Arabic dialects is an ongoing research challenge, which has been explored in recent work that defines dialects based on increasingly limited geographic areas like cities and provinces. This paper focuses on a…
Similarities between language representations derived from Self-Supervised Speech Models (S3Ms) have been observed to primarily reflect geographic proximity or surface typological similarities driven by recent expansion or contact,…
Many studies have shown that human languages tend to optimize for lower complexity and increased communication efficiency. Syntactic dependency distance, which measures the linear distance between dependent words, is often considered a key…
Linguistic Code Switching (CS) is a phenomenon that occurs when multilingual speakers alternate between two or more languages/dialects within a single conversation. Processing CS data is especially challenging in intra-sentential data given…
We describe a cross-lingual adaptation method based on syntactic parse trees obtained from the Universal Dependencies (UD), which are consistent across languages, to develop classifiers in low-resource languages. The idea of UD parsing is…
Traditional syntax models typically leverage part-of-speech (POS) information by constructing features from hand-tuned templates. We demonstrate that a better approach is to utilize POS tags as a regularizer of learned representations. We…