Modeling Global Syntactic Variation in English Using Dialect Classification

AbstractThis paper evaluates global-scale dialect identification for 14 national varieties of English on both web-crawled data and Twitter data. The paper makes three main contributions: (i) introducing data-driven language mapping as a method for selecting the inventory of national varieties to include in the task; (ii) producing a large and dynamic set of syntactic features using grammar induction rather than focusing on a few hand-selected features such as function words; and (iii) comparing models across both web corpora and social media corpora in order to measure the robustness of syntactic variation across registers.