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...

This research suggests a method for machine translation among two Kurdish dialects. We chose the two widely spoken dialects, Kurmanji and Sorani, which are considered to be mutually unintelligible. Also, despite being spoken by about 30 million people in different countries, Kurdish is among less-resourced languages. The research used bi-dialectal dictionaries and showed that the lack of parall...

Short-term accommodation is considered as one of the main factors in dialect levelling and the spread of linguistic innovations. This study investigates how speakers of Grison and Zurich German two Swiss German dialects shift their productions of short vowels after being exposed to each other's dialect in a dialogue. We found asymmetrical behaviour in accommodation between the two dialects: on ...

Previous studies have revealed that, depending on the language, listeners can identify speakers’ dialects quite well. The role of segments and prosody in this task is largely unknown, however. In a between-subjects design, we tested a total of 30 listeners in two conditions: in the unmorphed condition, listeners heard original sentences from two Swiss German dialects; in the duration morphed co...

This paper describes a project which has explored the feasibility of using a computer to perform a significant portion of the changes required to adapt text from one dialect to several others. This ongoing experiment has examined adaptation between various dialects of Quechua, finding that a computer program may be an important tool for adaptation. An experimental computer program was written a...

The DLF dialects of description logic are fragments of first order logic with underlying signatures based on unary predicate symbols and on unary function symbols interpreted as total functions. In earlier work, we have shown how computational properties of logical consequence for dialects of this family without inverse features are preserved when unary function symbols are interpreted instead ...

Lexical pitch accent languages such as Swedish and Japanese have been claimed to exhibit variation in phonological inventory and/or phonetic manifestation of pitch accents. This paper reports variations in the phonetic manifestation as well as phonological patterning of the lexical H*+L pitch accent in two Ryukyuan dialects – Shuri and Nakijin. The F0 manifestation of H*+L pitch accent in the t...

The Northern and Western dialects of the Mon-Khmer language Kammu use fundamental frequency to distinguish words, while the Eastern dialect relies on the contrastive voicing of initial consonants to distinguish words which display an F0 contrast in the other dialects. The production and perception of tones in the three dialects is investigated, using recordings and perception tests. As expected...

Identifying the different varieties of the same language is more challenging than unrelated languages identification. In this paper, we propose an approach to discriminate language varieties or dialects of Mandarin Chinese for the Mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Macao, Malaysia and Singapore, a.k.a., the Greater China Region (GCR). When applied to the dialects identification of the GCR, we f...