Lisa Green
2022
Corpus-Guided Contrast Sets for Morphosyntactic Feature Detection in Low-Resource English Varieties
Tessa Masis
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Anissa Neal
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Lisa Green
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Brendan O’Connor
Proceedings of the first workshop on NLP applications to field linguistics
The study of language variation examines how language varies between and within different groups of speakers, shedding light on how we use language to construct identities and how social contexts affect language use. A common method is to identify instances of a certain linguistic feature - say, the zero copula construction - in a corpus, and analyze the feature’s distribution across speakers, topics, and other variables, to either gain a qualitative understanding of the feature’s function or systematically measure variation. In this paper, we explore the challenging task of automatic morphosyntactic feature detection in low-resource English varieties. We present a human-in-the-loop approach to generate and filter effective contrast sets via corpus-guided edits. We show that our approach improves feature detection for both Indian English and African American English, demonstrate how it can assist linguistic research, and release our fine-tuned models for use by other researchers.
2016
Demographic Dialectal Variation in Social Media: A Case Study of African-American English
Su Lin Blodgett
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Lisa Green
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Brendan O’Connor
Proceedings of the 2016 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
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