Computational Models of Dialectal Variation and Underlying Linguistic Features

Abstract

The report illustrates the results of the joint research activity carried out from June 13th to July 4th 2010 at the University of Groningen - Faculty of Arts - Center for Language and Cognition Groningen (CLCG) directed by Prof. John Nerbonne. In particular, it illustrates the application and specialization of the technique of "hierarchical bipartite spectral graph partitioning" (Wieling and Nerbonne, 2010) with respect to the dialectal corpus of the Atlante Lessicale Toscano (\u27Lexical Atlas of Tuscany\u27, henceforth ALT) and discusses achieved results. The analysis focuses on the level of phonetic variation: this is the level of analysis for which an aggregate analysis of the ALT dialectal corpus has provided divergent results compared to the analyses by Giannelli (1976, 2000) and Pellegrini (1977), as documented in Montemagni (2007, 2008). Phonetic variation in Tuscany thus provides a particularly challenging case study to test the potential of this new analysis technique to study models of linguistic variation