The Arabic language is a collection of spoken dialects with important phonological, morphological, lexical, and syntactic differences, along with a standard written language, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). Since the spoken dialects are not officially written, it is very costly to obtain adequate corpora to use for training dialect NLP tools such as parsers. In this paper, we address the problem ...

It is well known that canonical Spanish, the dialectal variant ‘central’ of Spain, so called Castilian, can be transcribed by rules. This paper deals with the automatic grapheme to phoneme transcription rules in several Spanish dialects from Latin America. Spanish is a language spoken by more than 300 million people, has an important geographical dispersion compared among other languages and ha...

Resource scarcity along with diversity– both in dialect and script–are the two primary challenges in Kurdish language processing. In this paper we aim at addressing these two problems by (i) building a text corpus for Sorani and Kurmanji, the two main dialects of Kurdish, and (ii) highlighting some of the orthographic, phonological, and morphological differences between these two dialects from ...

We describe in this paper the implementation and use of custom specializers in two current dialects of Lisp: Skill and Common Lisp. We motivate the need for such specializers by appealing to clarity of expression, referring to experience in existing industrial applications. We discuss the implementation details of such user-defined specializers in both dialects of Lisp, detailing open problems ...

There are various ways in which religious affiliation can present itself as a sociolinguistic variable in Arabic dialects. The best-documented case is probably that of Baghdadi Arabic, in which Blanc (1964) reports that three “communal dialects” exist (or existed, until virtually all Jewish Iraqis emigrated westward) – the mainstream Muslim koiné, and a Christian and Jewish variety, which share...

State-of-the-art speech recognition systems handle continuous speech and are speaker-independent. However, the lingustic information conveyed in the intonational contour is neglected. To be able to fully recognize speech, this information must be interpreted. To this end, explicit knowledge of dialectal and individual variation is required. In this paper some acoustic correlates of wh-focus in ...