One of the challenges of developing a visual language for human-to-human communication is coming up with a large enough visual vocabulary that users are not overly limited in the meanings they can express. If a language system can provide extension mechanisms directly to its end users, then the language, or various dialects of it, can grow with their use. Using an experimental prototype of a vi...

Literary and dialect languages influence each other and, as a result, mutual enrichment occurs, in particular botanical vocabulary. Comparison of folk literary floristic names the Ukrainian language reveals: common for dialects (with phonetic, word-formative, semantic variants dialects); with different lexical meanings; many words broader structure dialects; figurative meaning existence lexemes...

This study presents a data-driven categorisation (cluster analysis) of 86 Swedish dialects, based on durational measurements of long and short vowels and consonants. The study reveals a clear geographic distribution that, for the most part, corresponds with dialectological descriptions. For a minor group of dialects, however, the results suggest mismatches between the quantity system and the ob...

While it is has often been observed that the product of translation is somehow different than non-translated text, scholars have emphasized two distinct bases for such differences. Some have noted interference from the source language spilling over into translation in a source-language-specific way, while others have noted general effects of the process of translation that are independent of so...

In this paper we apply various clustering algorithms to the dialect pronunciation data. At the same time we propose several evaluation techniques that should be used in order to deal with the instability of the clustering techniques. The results have shown that three hierarchical clustering algorithms are not suitable for the data we are working with. The rest of the tested algorithms have succ...

We describe several systems for identifying short samples of Arabic or SwissGerman dialects, which were prepared for the shared task of the 2017 DSLWorkshop (Zampieri et al., 2017). The Arabic data comprises both text and acoustic files, and our best run combined both. The SwissGerman data is text-only. Coincidently, our best runs achieved a accuracy of nearly 63% on both the Swiss-German and A...

This project measures and classifies language variation. In contrast to earlier dialectology, we seek a comprehensive characterization of (potentially gradual) differences between dialects, rather than a geographic delineation of (discrete) features of individual words or pronunciations. More general characterizations of dialect differences then become available. We measure phonetic (un)related...

We present MAGEAD, a morphological analyzer and generator for the Arabic language family. Our work is novel in that it explicitly addresses the need for processing the morphology of the dialects. MAGEAD performs an on-line analysis to or generation from a root+pattern+features representation, it has separate phonological and orthographic representations, and it allows for combining morphemes fr...

Japanese dialects are largely classified into two types in terms of prosodic systems, one having a lexical pitch contrast and the other having no such contrast. Dialects of the latter type are called ‘accentless’ dialects. Many previous studies reported that, in areas where an accentless dialect had been originally spoken, younger speakers acquired Standard Japanese lexical pitch accent and are...