Can I guess where you are from? Modeling dialectal morphosyntactic similarities in Brazilian Portuguese

Manoel Siqueira, Raquel Freitag


Abstract
This paper investigates morphosyntactic covariation in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) to assess whether dialectal origin can be inferred from the combined behavior of linguistic variables. Focusing on four grammatical phenomena related to second-person pronoun, correlation and clustering methods are applied to model covariation and dialectal distribution. The results indicate that correlation captures only limited pairwise associations, whereas clustering reveals speaker groupings that reflect regional dialectal patterns. Despite the methodological constraints imposed by differences in sample size requirements between sociolinguistics and computational approaches, the study highlights the importance of interdisciplinary research. Developing fair and inclusive language technologies that respect dialectal diversity outweighs the challenges of integrating these fields.
Anthology ID:
2026.propor-1.59
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 1
Month:
April
Year:
2026
Address:
Salvador, Brazil
Editors:
Marlo Souza, Iria de-Dios-Flores, Diana Santos, Larissa Freitas, Jackson Wilke da Cruz Souza, Eugénio Ribeiro
Venue:
PROPOR
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
601–610
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-1.59/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Manoel Siqueira and Raquel Freitag. 2026. Can I guess where you are from? Modeling dialectal morphosyntactic similarities in Brazilian Portuguese. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 1, pages 601–610, Salvador, Brazil. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Can I guess where you are from? Modeling dialectal morphosyntactic similarities in Brazilian Portuguese (Siqueira & Freitag, PROPOR 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-1.59.pdf