We present the results of two studies of the use of spatial reference frames in speakers of 11 linguistic varieties. A series of mixed-models linear regression analyses of the responses to a referential communication task shows the significant factors in predicting frame use to be the participants’ first and second-language, their literacy, the local topography and population density. This sugg...

The great amount of text produced every day in the Web turned it as one of the main sources for obtaining linguistic corpora, that are further analyzed with Natural Language Processing techniques. On a global scale, languages such as Portuguese —official in 9 countries— appear on the Web in several varieties, with lexical, morphological and syntactic (among others) differences. Besides, a unifi...

The present research focuses on the relation between tone and gesture across varieties of the same language, European Portuguese (EP). Three questions are addressed: (i) whether EP varieties use different visual cues while producing different sentence types/pragmatic meanings, (ii) if there is a relation between intonational variation and variability (if any) of visual cues, and (iii) if each l...

This paper proposes a method to automatically classify texts from different varieties of the same language. We show that similarity measure is a robust tool for studying comparable corpora of language variations. We take LDC’s Chinese Gigaword Corpus composed of three varieties of Chinese from Mainland China, Singapore, and Taiwan, as the comparable corpora. Top-bag-of-word similarity measures ...

In this paper, we present an in-depth investigation of the linguistic knowledge encoded by transformer models currently available for Italian language. particular, investigate how complexity two different architectures probing affects performance Transformers in encoding a wide spectrum features. Moreover, explore implicit varies according to textual genres and language varieties.

Most work in natural language processing is geared towards written, standardized language varieties. This focus is generally justified on practical grounds of data availability and socio-economical relevance, but does not always reflect the linguistic reality of sub-standard varieties. In this paper, we aim at the computational description of the morphology of a language with continuous interna...