Modeling Global Syntactic Variation in English Using Dialect Classification

Jonathan Dunn

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arXiv · 1904.05527

Modeling Global Syntactic Variation in English Using Dialect Classification

Jonathan Dunn

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Abstract

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 set of syntactic features using grammar induction rather than focusing on a few hand-selected features such as function words; and (iii) comparing models across both web corpora and social media corpora in order to measure the robustness of syntactic variation across registers.

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Jonathan Dunn. 2019-04-11. Modeling Global Syntactic Variation in English Using Dialect Classification. https://arxiv.org/abs/1904.05527

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