We study highly granular dialect normalization and phonological dialect translation on Limburgish, a non-standardized low-resource language with a wide variation in spelling conventions and phonology. We find improvements to the traditional transformer by embedding the geographic coordinates of dialects in dialect normalization tasks and use these geographically-embedded transformers to translate words between the phonologies of different dialects. These results are found to be consistent with notions in traditional Limburgish dialectology.

In this paper, we aim to introduce a Cognitive Linguistics perspective into a computational analysis of near-synonyms. We focus on a single set of Dutch near-synonyms, vernielen and vernietigen, roughly translated as ‘to destroy’, replicating the analysis from Geeraerts (1997) with distributional models. Our analysis, which tracks the meaning of both words in a corpus of 16th-20th century prose data, shows that both lexical items have undergone semantic change, led by differences in their prototypical semantic core.