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SUMMARY:Challenges and results of large-scale mapping of contemporary Engl
 ish dialects using online surveys - Dr Bert Vaux (Department of Linguistic
 s\, University of Cambridge)
DTSTART:20061102T170000Z
DTEND:20061102T183000Z
UID:TALK5646@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Christopher Lucas
DESCRIPTION:Linguists are just beginning to mine the web (typically via Go
 ogle)\nfor primary linguistic data (cf. Nakov and Hearst 2005\, A Study of
 \nUsing Search Engine Page Hits as a Proxy for n-gram Frequencies\, or\nNi
 cholson and Baldwin 2006\, Interpretation of Compound Nominalisations\nusi
 ng Corpus and Web Statistics). Back in 1997\, tired of saving\nhundreds of
  handwritten student surveys and having to present students\nwith generali
 sations about English dialects that ceased being true 75\nyears ago\, I de
 cided to create an engine for collecting linguistic\nsurvey data via the w
 eb. My hope was to collect up-to-date dialect\ndata and lots of it\, in a 
 form that could be directly dumped into a\ndatabase for statistical analys
 is and geographic visualisation. Nine\nyears and about eight surveys later
 \, a host of interesting and\nsurprising results have emerged concerning t
 he current form of English\nvarieties around the world. A number of unanti
 cipated challenges have\narisen as well. In this talk I present some of th
 e most striking of\nthese findings and problems.\n
LOCATION:GR06-7\, English Faculty\, 9 West Road (Sidgwick Site)
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