computational Dialectology

[Andrew Carnie]

From: robert westmoreland <rwestmor at silver.ucs.indiana.edu>


The paper described below is available by anonymous ftp at
        xxx.lanl.gov
under
        cmp-lg/papers/9503
as file
        9503002
or through WWW at
        http://xxx.lanl.gov/cmp-lg/

This is not an endorsement--I'm just passing this along FYI.
I know nothing about the paper or its author.

- --Robert Westmoreland

Paper: cmp-lg/9503002
From: Brett Kessler <kessler at Csli.Stanford.EDU>
Date: Wed, 1 Mar 1995 06:34:45 -0800

Title: Computational dialectology in Irish Gaelic
Author: Brett Kessler (Stanford University)
\\
Dialect groupings can be discovered objectively and automatically by cluster
analysis of phonetic transcriptions such as those found in a linguistic atlas.
The first step in the analysis, the computation of linguistic distance between
each pair of sites, can be computed as Levenshtein distance between phonetic
strings. This correlates closely with the much more laborious technique of
determining and counting isoglosses, and is more accurate than the more
familiar metric of computing Hamming distance based on whether vocabulary
entries match. In the actual clustering step, traditional agglomerative
clustering works better than the top-down technique of partitioning around
medoids. When agglomerative clustering of phonetic string comparison distances
is applied to Gaelic, reasonable dialect boundaries are obtained, corresponding
to national and (within Ireland) provincial boundaries.
\\ (cmp-lg/9503002 ,  43kb)


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