Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey

Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics" that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the relation between language and social identity, language use in social interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication: 18th February, 201

The Sensitivity of Language Models and Humans to Winograd Schema Perturbations

Large-scale pretrained language models are the major driving force behind recent improvements in performance on the Winograd Schema Challenge, a widely employed test of common sense reasoning ability. We show, however, with a new diagnostic dataset, that these models are sensitive to linguistic perturbations of the Winograd examples that minimally affect human understanding. Our results highlight interesting differences between humans and language models: language models are more sensitive to number or gender alternations and synonym replacements than humans, and humans are more stable and consistent in their predictions, maintain a much higher absolute performance, and perform better on non-associative instances than associative ones. Overall, humans are correct more often than out-of-the-box models, and the models are sometimes right for the wrong reasons. Finally, we show that fine-tuning on a large, task-specific dataset can offer a solution to these issues.Comment: ACL 202

The role of cultural diversity in e-based language learning.\ud A comparative study of Bulgarian and Lithuanian learners of German as a foreign language using an online learning platform

The study reported on in this paper focusses on the impact of cultural\ud factors in media-based language acquisition. The study sets out to investigate the\ud role of learners‟ cultural dispositions during the use of media-based programs in\ud language learning. More specifically, the study aimed at finding out to what extent\ud the cultural disposition of learners outweighs the learners‟ individual preferences\ud in a media-based (online) language course. The analysis of input data produced\ud strong differences between the two learning cultures at the outset of the study.\ud Lithuanian learners were found to be more passive, more rule oriented, more\ud reliant on their mother tongue as a means of instruction and less tolerant vis-à-vis\ud ambiguity when they entered the experiment. They also turned out to reject open\ud (less teacher-guided) forms of communicative learning requiring active\ud participation and, instead, preferred language teaching to be (passively)\ud entertaining. Bulgarian learners by contrast were more tolerant vis-à-vis ambiguity\ud and more goal-oriented with respect to learning the foreign language for academic\ud success abroad. They also turned out to be more focussed on and appreciative of\ud the technical aspects of the program and thus were eager to explore new\ud approaches to media-based learning. However, over the course of the study both\ud groups of participants developed an unexpected ability to adapt to the electronic\ud media even though the program seemed to counteract their cultural-specific\ud preferences. The study shows that both groups of learners improved significantly\ud over the course of the experiment with respect to language skills and that\ud acceptance of the program was high in both groups despite the initial resistance\ud and despite the fact that the program requires a well developed level of\ud independence. Despite the fact that a tendency to act according to cultural\ud dispositions can be shown those influences were not found to be statistically\ud significant