Analyzing dialect variation in historical speech corpora

Tagging Historical Corpora - the problem of spelling variation

Spelling issues tend to create relatively minor (though still complex) problems for corpus linguistics, information retrieval and natural language processing tasks that use ‘standard’ or modern varieties of English. For example, in corpus annotation, we have to decide how to deal with tokenisation issues such as whether (i) periods represent sentence boundaries or acronyms and (ii) apostrophes ...

Dialect Variation in Speaking Rate

The difference in speaking rates among American English regional dialects have been assumed and become popular belief in U.S. culture without supporting evidence to prove or disprove it. This study compares the speaking rates of those in south-central Wisconsin and western North Carolina in order to see if southerners do, in fact, speak more slowly than northerners. Age and gender are also comp...

Corpora and Historical Dictionaries

Children's perception of dialect variation.

A speaker's regional dialect is a rich source of information about that person. Two studies examined five- to six-year-old children's perception of regional dialect: Can they perceive differences among dialects? Have they made meaningful social connections to specific dialects? Experiment 1 asked children to categorize speakers into groups based on their accent; Experiment 2 asked them to match...

Automatic estimation of dialect mixing ratio for dialect speech recognition

This paper proposes methods for determining an appropriate mixing ratio of dialects in automatic speech recognition (ASR) for dialects. To handle ASR for various dialects, it has been reported to be effective to train a language model using a dialectmixed corpus. One reason behind this is geographical continuity of spoken dialect; we regard spoken dialect as a mixture of various dialects. This ...