Karlien Franco


2024

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Highly Granular Dialect Normalization and Phonological Dialect Translation for Limburgish
Andreas Simons | Stefano De Pascale | Karlien Franco
Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects (VarDial 2024)

We study highly granular dialect normalization and phonological dialect translation on Limburgish, a non-standardized low-resource language with a wide variation in spelling conventions and phonology. We find improvements to the traditional transformer by embedding the geographic coordinates of dialects in dialect normalization tasks and use these geographically-embedded transformers to translate words between the phonologies of different dialects. These results are found to be consistent with notions in traditional Limburgish dialectology.

2022

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Deconstructing destruction: A Cognitive Linguistics perspective on a computational analysis of diachronic change
Karlien Franco | Mariana Montes | Kris Heylen
Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Computational Approaches to Historical Language Change

In this paper, we aim to introduce a Cognitive Linguistics perspective into a computational analysis of near-synonyms. We focus on a single set of Dutch near-synonyms, vernielen and vernietigen, roughly translated as ‘to destroy’, replicating the analysis from Geeraerts (1997) with distributional models. Our analysis, which tracks the meaning of both words in a corpus of 16th-20th century prose data, shows that both lexical items have undergone semantic change, led by differences in their prototypical semantic core.