Exploring Language Variation Across Europe - A Web-based Tool for Computational Sociolinguistics
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)
Abstract
Language varies not only between countries, but also along regional and socio-demographic lines. This variation is one of the driving factors behind language change. However, investigating language variation is a complex undertaking: the more factors we want to consider, the more data we need. Traditional qualitative methods are not well-suited to do this, an therefore restricted to isolated factors. This reduction limits the potential insights, and risks attributing undue importance to easily observed factors. While there is a large interest in linguistics to increase the quantitative aspect of such studies, it requires training in both variational linguistics and computational methods, a combination that is still not common. We take a first step here to alleviating the problem by providing an interface, www.languagevariation.com, to explore large-scale language variation along multiple socio-demographic factors -- without programming knowledge. It makes use of large amounts of data and provides statistical analyses, maps, and interactive features that will enable scholars to explore language variation in a data-driven way.