LSTM Autoencoders for Dialect Analysis

Abstract

Computational approaches for dialectometry employed Levenshtein distance to compute an aggregate similarity between two dialects belonging to a single language group. In this paper, we apply a sequence-to-sequence autoencoder to learn a deep representation for words that can be used for meaningful comparison across dialects. In contrast to the alignment-based methods, our method does not require explicit alignments. We apply our architectures to three different datasets and show that the learned representations indicate highly similar results with the analyses based on Levenshtein distance and capture the traditional dialectal differences shown by dialectologists.

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Reproductions