Interactive maps for corpus-based dialectology

Yves Scherrer, Olli Kuparinen


Abstract
Traditional data collection methods in dialectology rely on structured surveys, whose results can be easily presented on printed or digital maps. But in recent years, corpora of transcribed dialect speech have become a precious alternative data source for data-driven linguistic analysis. For example, topic models can be advantageously used to discover both general dialectal variation patterns and specific linguistic features that are most characteristic for certain dialects. Multilingual (or rather, multilectal) language modeling tasks can also be used to learn speaker-specific embeddings. In connection with this paper, we introduce a website that presents the results of two recent studies in the form of interactive maps, allowing visitors to explore the effects of various parameter settings. The website covers two tasks (topic models and speaker embeddings) and three language areas (Finland, Norway, and German-speaking Switzerland). It is available at https://www.corcodial.net/ .
Anthology ID:
2025.nodalida-1.64
Volume:
Proceedings of the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025)
Month:
march
Year:
2025
Address:
Tallinn, Estonia
Editors:
Richard Johansson, Sara Stymne
Venue:
NoDaLiDa
SIG:
Publisher:
University of Tartu Library
Note:
Pages:
634–638
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Author-page-Marten-During-lu/2025.nodalida-1.64/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yves Scherrer and Olli Kuparinen. 2025. Interactive maps for corpus-based dialectology. In Proceedings of the Joint 25th Nordic Conference on Computational Linguistics and 11th Baltic Conference on Human Language Technologies (NoDaLiDa/Baltic-HLT 2025), pages 634–638, Tallinn, Estonia. University of Tartu Library.
Cite (Informal):
Interactive maps for corpus-based dialectology (Scherrer & Kuparinen, NoDaLiDa 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/Author-page-Marten-During-lu/2025.nodalida-1.64.pdf