marco@work - Linguistic Variation and Computation

In Linguistic Variation and Computation door John Nerbonne uit april 2003 in Proceedings of the 10th Meeting of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics wordt voor mensen die relatief onbekend zijn met Computationele Dialectologie de vraag wat de determinanten zijn van dialectvariatie geherformuleerd op een manier die zich richt op aggregeerbare afstand in plaats van op de concrete realisatie van specifieke taalkundige varianten.

Abstract:
Language variationists study how languages vary along geographical or social lines or along lines of age and gender. Variationist data is available and challenging, in particular for DIALECTOLOGY, the study of geographical variation, which will be the focus of this paper, although we present approaches we expect to transfer smoothly to the study of variation correlating with other extralinguistic variables. Techniques from computational linguistics on the one hand, and standard statistical data reduction techniques on the other, not only shed light on this classic linguistic problem, but they also suggest avenues for exploring the question at more abstract levels, and perhaps for seeking the determinants of variation.