Detecting Shibboleths
Jelena Prokić, ÇaÄŸrı Çöltekin, John A. Nerbonne · 2012
A SHIBBOLETH is a pronunciation, or, more generally, a variant of speech that betrays where a speaker is from (Judges 12:6). We propose a generalization of the well-known precision and recall scores to deal with the case of detecting distinctive, characteristic variants when the analysis is based on numerical difference scores. We also compare our proposal to Fisher’s linear discriminant, and we demonstrate its effectiveness on Dutch and German dialect data. It is a general method that can be applied both in synchronic and diachronic linguistics that involve automatic classification of linguistic entities. 1