Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects
A Computational Perspective

Introduces core topics in language variation and the computational methods applied to similar languages, varieties, and dialects.

Marcos Zampieri (Edited by), Preslav Nakov (Edited by)

9781108429351, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 2 September 2021

344 pages, 1 colour illus.
23.4 x 15.5 x 2.2 cm, 0.61 kg

'Variation is a key aspect of human language, and yet it has been too often overlooked in computational linguistics. The book edited by Marcos Zampieri and Preslav Nakov is an important step towards filling this gap with top-level contributions that offer a new alliance between natural language processing and linguistic theory to understand this complex phenomenon and its impact on applications.' Alessandro Lenci, University of Pisa

Language resources and computational models are becoming increasingly important for the study of language variation. A main challenge of this interdisciplinary field is that linguistics researchers may not be familiar with these helpful computational tools and many NLP researchers are often not familiar with language variation phenomena. This essential reference introduces researchers to the necessary computational models for processing similar languages, varieties, and dialects. In this book, leading experts tackle the inherent challenges of the field by balancing a thorough discussion of the theoretical background with a meaningful overview of state-of-the-art language technology. The book can be used in a graduate course, or as a supplementary text for courses on language variation, dialectology, and sociolinguistics or on computational linguistics and NLP. Part 1 covers the linguistic fundamentals of the field such as the question of status and language variation. Part 2 discusses data collection and pre-processing methods. Finally, Part 3 presents NLP applications such as speech processing, machine translation, and language-specific issues in Arabic and Chinese.

Introduction Marcos Zampieri and Preslav Nakov
Part I: Language variation James Walker
Phonetic variation in dialects Rachael Tatman
3. Similar languages, varieties and dialects Miriam Meyerhoff and Steffen Klaere
4. Mutual intelligibility Charlotte Gooskens and Vincent J. van Heuven
5. Dialectology for computational linguists John Nerbonne, Wilbert Heeringa, Jelena Proki? and Martijn Wieling
Part II: 6. Data collection and representation for similar languages, varieties and dialects Tanja Samardži? and Nikola Ljubeši?
7. Adaptation of morphosyntactic taggers Yves Scherrer
8. Sharing dependency parsers between similar languages Željko Agi?
Part III: 9. Dialect and similar language identification Marcos Zampieri
10. Dialect variation on social media Dong Nguyen
11. Machine translation between similar languages Preslav Nakov and Jorg Tiedemann
12. Automatic spoken dialect identification Pedro Torres-Carrasquillo and Bengt Borgström
13. Arabic dialect processing Nizar Habash
14. Automatic classification of varieties of Mandarin Chinese Hongzhi Xu, Menghan Jiang, Jingxia Lin, Dingxu Shi and Chu-Ren Huang.

Subject Areas: Artificial intelligence [UYQ]