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EMNLP2016

Demographic Dialectal Variation in Social Media: A Case Study of African-American English

Su Lin Blodgett · Lisa Green · Brendan O’Connor

Sociolinguistics
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The short version

A study of African-American English in online conversation. The authors develop a model for identifying AAE-like language, examine its linguistic features, and show that existing language-identification and parsing tools perform unevenly across language varieties.

Notes for the reading desk

  1. Language variation matters when evaluating computational tools.
  2. A model’s errors may reflect the varieties represented in its training data.
  3. Demographic associations in a corpus are not individual identity determinations.

Explore the themes

African-American EnglishAAEdialectTwitterlanguage variationNLP

Citation

Blodgett, S. L., Green, L., & O’Connor, B. (2016). Demographic Dialectal Variation in Social Media: A Case Study of African-American English. Proceedings of EMNLP, 1119–1130. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/D16-1120

Summary and reading notes are editorial guides. The linked paper is the original source.