Computational dialectology in Irish Gaelic
EACL '95 Proceedings of the seventh conference on European chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Multiple sequence alignments in linguistics
LaTeCH-SHELT&R '09 Proceedings of the EACL 2009 Workshop on Language Technology and Resources for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, Humanities, and Education
Computer Speech and Language
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In this paper we use the Reeks Nederlandse Dialectatlassen as a source for the reconstruction of a 'proto-language' of Dutch dialects. We used 360 dialects from locations in the Netherlands, the northern part of Belgium and French-Flanders. The density of dialect locations is about the same everywhere. For each dialect we reconstructed 85 words. For the reconstruction of vowels we used knowledge of Dutch history, and for the reconstruction of consonants we used well-known tendencies found in most textbooks about historical linguistics. We validated results by comparing the reconstructed forms with pronunciations according to a proto-Germanic dictionary (Köbler, 2003). For 46% of the words we reconstructed the same vowel or the closest possible vowel when the vowel to be reconstructed was not found in the dialect material. For 52% of the words all consonants we reconstructed were the same. For 42% of the words, only one consonant was differently reconstructed. We measured the divergence of Dutch dialects from their 'proto-language'. We measured pronunciation distances to the proto-language we reconstructed ourselves and correlated them with pronunciation distances we measured to proto-Germanic based on the dictionary. Pronunciation distances were measured using Levenshtein distance, a string edit distance measure. We found a relatively strong correlation (r=0.87).