Traditional Estonian dialect classifications are based on the phonology, morphology, and lexis, and there are very few studies about syntax available. The present paper is the first quantitative syntactic study of Estonian dialects. We concentrate on constructions consisting of finite and non-finite verbs, and we apply contemporary statistical methods to explore the syntactic variation. Our res...

We adopt automatic language recognition methods to study dialect levelling — a phenomenon that leads to reduced structural differences among dialects in a given spoken language. In terms of dialect characterisation, levelling is a nuisance variable that adversely affects recognition accuracy: the more similar two dialects are, the harder it is to set them apart. We address levelling in Finnish ...

The Continental West Germanic Languages include the standard varieties of Dutch, Frisian, and High German, as well as a large number of non-standard varieties, the more familiar of which are the dialects spoken in Belgium and the South of the Netherlands (Flemish, Brabantish, Limburgian), Northern Germany (Low German), the Rhine Valley (Luxemburgish), South-Eastern Germany and Austria (e.g. Bav...

Arabic dialects do not just share a common koiné, but there are shared pandialectal linguistic phenomena that allow computational models for dialects to learn from each other. In this paper we build a unified segmentation model where the training data for different dialects are combined and a single model is trained. The model yields higher accuracies than dialect-specific models, eliminating t...

In this paper, the specific trait of Persian signatures is applied to signature verification. Efficient features, which can discriminate among Persian signatures, are investigated in this approach. Persian signatures, in comparison with other languages signatures, have more curvature and end in a specific style. An experiment has been designed to determine the function indicating the most robus...

This paper presents an automated supervised method for Persian wordnet construction. Using a Persian corpus and a bi-lingual dictionary, the initial links between Persian words and Princeton WordNet synsets have been generated. These links will be discriminated later as correct or incorrect by employing seven features in a trained classification system. The whole method is just a classification...

This is apreliminary report on the phonetic interaction of tone and consonant voicing in K m u , a language where some dialects use Fo for producing distinctive word tones, while others do not have tones but rely on the contrastive voicing of initial consonants to distinguish words which tonal dialects distinguishes with tones. Speakers of non-tonal dialects produce no significant Fo diflerence...

Previous studies on the perception of language prosody and dialectal prosody have shown that languages and regional dialects can be identified by prosodic cues alone. This pilot study tests this for 4 Swiss German dialects. 70 subjects are presented with filtered speech material, devoid of segmental cues. The filter was applied for frequencies between 250 Hz7000 Hz. Despite this filtering, 3 of...

In this paper, a new proposed system for Persian printed numeral characters recognition with emphasis on representation and recognition stages is introduced. For the first time, in Persian optical character recognition, geometrical central moments as character image descriptor and fuzzy min-max neural network for Persian numeral character recognition has been used. Set of different experiments ...