Crowdsourcing Regional Variation Data and Automatic Geolocalisation of Speakers of European French
Jean-Philippe Goldman, Yves Scherrer, Julie Glikman, Mathieu Avanzi, Christophe Benzitoun, Philippe Boula de Mareüil · 2018
We present the crowdsourcing platform Donnez Votre Français à la Science (DFS, or "Give your French to Science"), which aims to collect linguistic data and document language use, with a special focus on regional variation in European French.The activities not only gather data that is useful for scientific studies, but they also provide feedback to the general public; this is important in order to reward participants, to encourage them to follow future surveys, and to foster interaction with the scientific community.The two main activities described here are 1) a linguistic survey on lexical variation with immediate feedback and 2) a speaker geolocalisation system; i.e., a quiz that guesses the linguistic origin of the participant by comparing their answers with previously gathered linguistic data.For the geolocalisation activity, we set up a simulation framework to optimise predictions.Three classification algorithms are compared: the first one uses clustering and shibboleth detection, whereas the other two rely on feature elimination techniques with Support Vector Machines and Maximum Entropy models as underlying base classifiers.The best-performing system uses a selection of 17 questions and reaches a localisation accuracy of 66%, extending the prediction from the one-best area (one among 109 base areas) to its first-order and second-order neighbouring areas.