One of the purposes of the VarDial workshop series is to encourage research into NLP methods that treat human languages as a continuum, by designing models that exploit the similarities between languages and variants. In my work, I am using a continuous vector representation of languages that allows modeling and exploring the language continuum in a very direct way. The basic tool for this is a...

Since Talmy (2000 a&b) introduced his linguistic typology based on event conflation, it has been the source of much debate and ongoing research. One area that can particularly benefit from such research is the field of Second Language Acquisition. Cadierno (2008), Inagaki (2002) and many others have attempted to unveil the differences and difficulties that occur when learning a second language ...

We outline the first application of Native Language Identification (NLI) to Finnish learner data. NLI is the task of predicting an author’s first language using writings in an acquired language. Using data from a new learner corpus of Finnish — a language typology quite different from others previously investigated, with its morphological richness potentially causing difficulties — we show that...

An online tool based on dialectometric methods, DistGraph, is applied to a group of Kru languages of Côte d’Ivoire, Liberia and Burkina Faso. The inputs to this resource consist of tables of languages x linguistic features (e.g. phonological, lexical or grammatical), and statistical and graphical outputs are generated which show similarities and differences between the languages in terms of the...

Language documentation is important as a tool for preservation of endangered languages and making data available to speakers and researchers of a language. A data base such as TypeCraft is important for typology studies both for well documented languages as well as little documented languages and is a valid tool for comparison of languages. This requires that linguistic elements must be coded i...

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