The INCOMSLAV Platform: Experimental Website with Integrated Methods for Measuring Linguistic Distances and Asymmetries in Receptive Multilingualism

Irina Stenger, Klara Jagrova, Tania Avgustinova

Abstract
We report on a web-based resource for conducting intercomprehension experiments with native speakers of Slavic languages and present our methods for measuring linguistic distances and asymmetries in receptive multilingualism. Through a website which serves as a platform for online testing, a large number of participants with different linguistic backgrounds can be targeted. A statistical language model is used to measure information density and to gauge how language users master various degrees of (un)intelligibilty. The key idea is that intercomprehension should be better when the model adapted for understanding the unknown language exhibits relatively low average distance and surprisal. All obtained intelligibility scores together with distance and asymmetry measures for the different language pairs and processing directions are made available as an integrated online resource in the form of a Slavic intercomprehension matrix (SlavMatrix).
Anthology ID:
2020.cllrd-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the LREC 2020 Workshop on "Citizen Linguistics in Language Resource Development"
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
James Fiumara, Christopher Cieri, Mark Liberman, Chris Callison-Burch
Venue:
CLLRD
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
40–48
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.cllrd-1.6
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Irina Stenger, Klara Jagrova, and Tania Avgustinova. 2020. The INCOMSLAV Platform: Experimental Website with Integrated Methods for Measuring Linguistic Distances and Asymmetries in Receptive Multilingualism. In Proceedings of the LREC 2020 Workshop on "Citizen Linguistics in Language Resource Development", pages 40–48, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
The INCOMSLAV Platform: Experimental Website with Integrated Methods for Measuring Linguistic Distances and Asymmetries in Receptive Multilingualism (Stenger et al., CLLRD 2020)
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