Humans continuously adapt their style and language to a variety of domains.
However, a reliable definition of `domain' has eluded researchers thus far.
Additionally, the notion of discrete domains stands in contrast to the
multiplicity of heterogeneous domains that humans navigate, many of which
overlap. In order to better understand the change and variation of human
language, we draw on research in domain adaptation and extend the notion of
discrete domains to the continuous spectrum. We propose representation
learning-based models that can adapt to continuous domains and detail how these
can be used to investigate variation in language. To this end, we propose to
use dialogue modeling as a test bed due to its proximity to language modeling
and its social component.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, published in Uphill Battles in Language
Processing workshop, EMNLP 201