Exploring language variation across Europe: a web-based tool for computational sociolinguistics.

TY - GEN

T1 - Exploring language variation across Europe

T2 - LREC 2016

AU - Hovy, Dirk

AU - Johannsen, Anders Trærup

PY - 2016

Y1 - 2016

N2 - 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, and 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.

AB - 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, and 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.

M3 - Article in proceedings

SN - 978-2-9517408-9-1

SP - 2986

EP - 2989

BT - Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)

PB - European Language Resources Association (ELRA)

Y2 - 23 May 2016 through 28 May 2016

ER -