Author: onepriceblog

Representations of Language Varieties Are Reliable

March 2, 2021

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 for modelling linguistic variation. The basic idea is that, if each source adequately represents a single underlying language variety, then … More Representations of Language Varieties Are Reliable

Measuring Linguistic Diversity During COVID-19

October 14, 2020

Abstract. Computational measures of linguistic diversity help us understand the linguistic landscape using digital language data. The contribution of this paper is to calibrate measures of linguistic diversity using restrictions on international travel resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous work has mapped the distribution of languages using geo-referenced social media and web data. The goal, … More Measuring Linguistic Diversity During COVID-19

Mapping Languages: The Corpus of Global Language Use

March 8, 2020

[Draft: Corpus_of_Global_Language_Use.Revisions.Preprint] [Data: The Corpus of Global Language Use v.4.2] Abstract This paper describes a web-based corpus of global language use with a focus on how this corpus can be used for data-driven language mapping. First, the corpus provides a representation of where national varieties of major languages are used (e.g., English, Arabic, Russian) together … More Mapping Languages: The Corpus of Global Language Use

Geographically-Balanced Gigaword Corpora for 50 Language Varieties

March 8, 2020

[Read draft here: LREC_2020] [GeoWAC Corpus Family] Abstract While text corpora have been steadily increasing in overall size, even very large corpora are not designed to represent global population demographics. For example, recent work has shown that existing English gigaword corpora over-represent inner-circle varieties from the US and the UK (Dunn, 2019b). To correct implicit … More Geographically-Balanced Gigaword Corpora for 50 Language Varieties

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