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
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2986–2989
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/L16-1477
- DOI:
- 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)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/L16-1477.pdf