Exploring Language Variation Across Europe - A Web-based Tool for Computational Sociolinguistics

Dirk Hovy, Anders Johannsen

Abstract
Language varies not only between countries, but also along regional and socio-demographic lines. This variation is one of the driving factors behind language change. However, investigating language variation is a complex undertaking: the more factors we want to consider, the more data we need. Traditional qualitative methods are not well-suited to do this, an therefore restricted to isolated factors. This reduction limits the potential insights, and risks attributing undue importance to easily observed factors. While there is a large interest in linguistics to increase the quantitative aspect of such studies, it requires training in both variational linguistics and computational methods, a combination that is still not common. We take a first step here to alleviating the problem by providing an interface, www.languagevariation.com, to explore large-scale language variation along multiple socio-demographic factors – without programming knowledge. It makes use of large amounts of data and provides statistical analyses, maps, and interactive features that will enable scholars to explore language variation in a data-driven way.
Anthology ID:
L16-1477
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2986–2989
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1477
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dirk Hovy and Anders Johannsen. 2016. Exploring Language Variation Across Europe - A Web-based Tool for Computational Sociolinguistics. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 2986–2989, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
Exploring Language Variation Across Europe - A Web-based Tool for Computational Sociolinguistics (Hovy & Johannsen, LREC 2016)
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