Ankur Bhatt


2024

pdf bib
When Elote, Choclo and Mazorca are not the Same. Isomorphism-Based Perspective to the Spanish Varieties Divergences
Cristina España-Bonet | Ankur Bhatt | Koel Dutta Chowdhury | Alberto Barrón-Cedeño
Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects (VarDial 2024)

Spanish is an official language in 20 countries; in 19 of them, it arrived by means of overseas colonisation. Its close contact with several coexistent languages and the rich regional and cultural diversity has produced varieties which divert from each other. We study these divergences in a data-based approach and according to their qualitative and quantitative effects in word embeddings. We generate embeddings for Spanish in 24 countries and examine the topology of the spaces. Due to the similarities between varieties —in contrast to what happens to different languages in bilingual topological studies— we first scrutinise the behaviour of three isomorphism measures in (quasi-)isomorphic settings: relational similarity, Eigenvalue similarity and Gromov-Hausdorff distance. We then use the most trustworthy measure to quantify the divergences among varieties. Finally, we use the departures from isomorphism to build relational trees for the Spanish varieties by hierarchical clustering.