@inproceedings{L16-1477,
 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.
},
 address = {Portorož, Slovenia},
 author = {Dirk Hovy and Anders Johannsen},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)},
 month = {May},
 pages = {2986--2989},
 publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)},
 title = {Exploring Language Variation Across Europe - A Web-based Tool for Computational Sociolinguistics},
 url = {https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/L16-1477},
 year = {2016}
}