@inproceedings{sung-etal-2024-new,
    title = "A New Dataset for Tonal and Segmental Dialectometry from the {Y}ue- and Pinghua-Speaking Area",
    author = "Sung, Ho Wang Matthew  and
      Prokic, Jelena  and
      Chen, Yiya",
    editor = "Hahn, Michael  and
      Sorokin, Alexey  and
      Kumar, Ritesh  and
      Shcherbakov, Andreas  and
      Otmakhova, Yulia  and
      Yang, Jinrui  and
      Serikov, Oleg  and
      Rani, Priya  and
      Ponti, Edoardo M.  and
      Murado{\u{g}}lu, Saliha  and
      Gao, Rena  and
      Cotterell, Ryan  and
      Vylomova, Ekaterina",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 6th Workshop on Research in Computational Linguistic Typology and Multilingual NLP",
    month = mar,
    year = "2024",
    address = "St. Julian's, Malta",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2024.sigtyp-1.3/",
    pages = "25--36",
    abstract = "Traditional dialectology or dialect geography is the study of geographical variation of language. Originated in Europe and pioneered in Germany and France, this field has predominantly been focusing on sounds, more specifically, on segments. Similarly, quantitative approaches to language variation concerned with the phonetic level are in most cases focusing on segments as well. However, more than half of the world{'}s languages include lexical tones (Yip, 2002). Despite this, tones are still underexplored in quantitative language comparison, partly due to the low accessibility of the suitable data. This paper aims to introduce a newly digitised dataset which comes from the Yue- and Pinghua-speaking areas in Southern China, with over 100 dialects. This dataset consists of two parts: tones and segments. In this paper, we illustrate how we can computationaly model tones in order to explore linguistic variation. We have applied a tone distance metric on our data, and we have found that 1) dialects also form a continuum on the tonal level and 2) other than tonemic (inventory) and tonetic differences, dialects can also differ in the lexical distribution of tones. The availability of this dataset will hopefully enable further exploration of the role of tones in quantitative typology and NLP research."
}