Can I guess where you are from? Modeling dialectal morphosyntactic similarities in Brazilian Portuguese
This work addresses the challenge of developing inclusive language technologies that respect dialectal diversity, though it is incremental in integrating sociolinguistics and computational methods.
The paper tackled the problem of inferring dialectal origin in Brazilian Portuguese by modeling morphosyntactic covariation, finding that clustering methods reveal regional patterns while correlation captures limited associations.
This paper investigates morphosyntactic covariation in Brazilian Portuguese (BP) to assess whether dialectal origin can be inferred from the combined behavior of linguistic variables. Focusing on four grammatical phenomena related to pronouns, correlation and clustering methods are applied to model covariation and dialectal distribution. The results indicate that correlation captures only limited pairwise associations, whereas clustering reveals speaker groupings that reflect regional dialectal patterns. Despite the methodological constraints imposed by differences in sample size requirements between sociolinguistics and computational approaches, the study highlights the importance of interdisciplinary research. Developing fair and inclusive language technologies that respect dialectal diversity outweighs the challenges of integrating these fields.