Before revision: Linguists characterize dialects by the presence, absence, and frequency of dozens of interpretable features . Detecting these features in text has applications to social science and dialectology, and can be used to assess the robustness of natural language processing systems to dialect differences  .
After revision: Linguists characterize dialects by the presence, absence, and frequency of dozens of dialect features in speech and text, such as the deletion of the copula in "He .