Author: onepriceblog

Global Syntactic Variation in Seven Languages: Towards a Computational Dialectology

July 22, 2019

[Read full-text] Abstract 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 dialectology/dialectometry. First, rather than assuming a fixed and incomplete set of variants, we use Computational Construction Grammar … More Global Syntactic Variation in Seven Languages: Towards a Computational Dialectology

Mapping Languages and Demographics with Georeferenced Corpora

July 22, 2019

[Read full-text] Co-authored with Ben Adams. Abstract This paper evaluates large georeferenced corpora, taken from both web-crawled and social media sources, against ground-truth population and language-census datasets. The goal is to determine (i) which dataset best represents population demographics; (ii) in what parts of the world the datasets are most representative of actual populations; and … More Mapping Languages and Demographics with Georeferenced Corpora

Modeling Global Syntactic Variation in English Using Dialect Classification

April 11, 2019

[Read Full-Text] [Presentation Slides] 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 for selecting the inventory of national varieties to include in the task; (ii) producing a large and dynamic … More Modeling Global Syntactic Variation in English Using Dialect Classification

Frequency vs. Association for Constraint Selection in Usage-Based Construction Grammar

April 11, 2019

[Read Full-Text] [Poster] 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 association-based models across eight languages using a metric derived from the Minimum Description Length paradigm. The experiments show that association-based models produce better generalizations … More Frequency vs. Association for Constraint Selection in Usage-Based Construction Grammar

Ontological and Grammatical Constraints on Metaphor Productivity

April 11, 2019

[Read Full-Text] Traditional approaches view metaphor as a semantic/pragmatic phenomenon that occurs at a conceptual level as mappings between independent concepts. These conceptual mappings are then lexicalized into observed metaphoric expressions. In this view, the lexical and grammatical structure of a metaphoric expression is not relevant to the underlying metaphor’s level of productivity. This paper … More Ontological and Grammatical Constraints on Metaphor Productivity

Gradient Semantic Intuitions of Metaphoric Expressions

November 7, 2018

[Read full-text: Gradient semantic intuitions of metaphoric expressions] Metaphoric expressions are not all equal, in the sense that some are intuitively more or less metaphoric than others. Part of this intuition is influenced by the underlying metaphor, but another part is influenced by the linguistic expression which carries that metaphor. This paper puts forward a … More Gradient Semantic Intuitions of Metaphoric Expressions

What Metaphor Identification Systems Can Tell Us About Metaphor-in-Language

November 7, 2018

[Read full-text: What metaphor identification systems can tell us] [Data: https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6oBPlj4dynZR3ZOZWd0bm54NTQ%5D This paper evaluates four metaphor identification systems on the 200,000 word VU Amsterdam Metaphor Corpus, comparing results by genre and by sub-class of metaphor. The paper then compares the rate of agreement between the systems for each genre and sub-class. Each of the identification … More What Metaphor Identification Systems Can Tell Us About Metaphor-in-Language