Measuring Dialect Distance Phonetically

Abstract

We describe ongoing work in the experimental evaluation of a range of inethods for measuring the phonetic distance between the dialectal variants of pronunciations. All are variants of Levenshtein distance, both simple (based on atomic characters) and complex (based on feature vectors). The measurements using feature vectors varied according to whether city-block distance, Euclidean distance or (a measure using) Pearson's correlation coefficient was taken as basic. Variants of these using feature weighting by entropy reduction were systematically compared, as was the representation of diphthongs (as one symbol or two). The results were compared to well-established scholarship in dialectology, yielding a dalibration of the method. These results indicate that feature representations are more sensitive, that city-block distance is a good measure of phonetic overlap of feature vectors, that weighting is not useful, and that two-phone representations of diphthongs provide a more satisfactory base for this sort of comparison.

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