The aim of the present study is twofold. First, it addresses the question of how well Norwegians are able to identify Norwegian dialects. Second, it investigates the role which intonation plays in the identification of Norwegian dialects. In a number of listening experiments, 15 groups of young Norwegians from different parts of Norway were asked to identify 15 different dialects. The dialects ...

In this paper, an automatic method for Persian WordNet construction based on Prenceton WordNet 2.1 (PWN) is introduced. The proposed approach uses Persian and English corpora as well as a bilingual dictionary in order to make a mapping between PWN synsets and Persian words. Our method calculates a score for each candidate synset of a given Persian word and for each of its translation, it select...

Speech rhythm can be measured acoustically in terms of durational characteristics of consonantal and vocalic intervals. The present paper investigated how acoustically measurable rhythm varies across dialects of Swiss German. Rhythmic measurements (%V, ∆C, ∆V, varcoC, varcoV, rPVI-C, nPVIC, nPVI-V) were carried out on four sentences of six speakers from eight Swiss dialects. Results indicate th...

The phrase-final accent can typically contain a multitude of simultaneous prosodic signals. In this study, aimed at separating the effects of lexical tone from phrase-final intonation, phrase-final accents of two dialects of Kammu were analyzed. Kammu, a Mon-Khmer language spoken primarily in northern Laos, has dialects with lexical tones and dialects with no lexical tones. Both dialects seem t...

Automatic dialect identification is a necessary Language Technology for processing multidialect languages in which the dialects are linguistically far from each other. Particularly, this becomes crucial where the dialects are mutually unintelligible. Therefore, to perform computational activities on these languages, the system needs to identify the dialect that is the subject of the process. Ku...

This paper attempts to establish the importance of differences in the tone inventories for the mutual intelligibility of 15 Chinese dialects. Tone influence for mutual intelligibility was tested in two studies. In the first study mutual intelligibility was measured through opinion testing. The fable “The North Wind and the Sun” was read by one male speaker in each of 15 Chinese dialects with me...

Persian is one of the Indo-European languages which has borrowed its script from Arabic, a member of Semitic language family. Since Persian and Arabic scripts are so similar, problems arise when we want to process an electronic text. In this paper, some of the common problems faced experimentally in developing a corpus for Persian are discussed. The sources of the problems are the Persian scrip...

The Persian language is one of the dominant languages in the Middle East, so there are significant amount of Persian documents available on the Web. Due to the special and different nature of the Persian language compared to other languages like English, the design of information retrieval systems in Persian requires special considerations. However, there are relatively few studies on retrieval...