We investigate national dialect identification, the task of classifying English documents according to their country of origin. We use corpora of known national origin as a proxy for national dialect. In order to identify general (as opposed to corpus-specific) characteristics of national dialects of English, we make use of a variety of corpora of different sources, with inter-corpus variation in length, topic and register. The central intuition is that features that are predictive of national origin across different data sources are features that characterize a national dialect. We examine a number of classification approaches motivated by different areas of research, and evaluate the performance of each method across 3 national dialects: Australian, British, and Canadian English. Our results demonstrate that there are lexical and syntactic characteristics of each national dialect that are consistent across data sources.
REF ) present a dialect classification approach to identify Australian, British, and Canadian English.
Classifying English Documents by National Dialect
ALTA
Geography Computer Science