# Exploring Diachronic and Diatopic Changes in Dialect Continua: Tasks, Datasets and Challenges

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.04010 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04010/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jul 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Diachronic word embeddings and semantic shifts: a survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03537/) (2018)
- [We Need to Talk About Random Splits](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.00636/) (2020)
- [DIALECTBENCH: A NLP Benchmark for Dialects, Varieties, and Closely-Related Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11009/) (2024)
- [Natural Language Processing for Dialects of a Language: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05632/) (2024)
- [Graph-based Clustering for Detecting Semantic Change Across Time and Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01025/) (2024)
- [Modeling Language Change in Historical Corpora: The Case of Portuguese](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.00030/) (2016)
- [In search of isoglosses: continuous and discrete language embeddings in Slavic historical phonology](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.13575/) (2020)
- [Letters From the Past: Modeling Historical Sound Change Through Diachronic Character Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.08256/) (2022)
- [Syntactic Language Change in English and German: Metrics, Parsers, and Convergences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11549/) (2024)
- [Presence or Absence: Are Unknown Word Usages in Dictionaries?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00656/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Everlasting contact between language communities leads to constant changes in languages over time, and gives rise to language varieties and dialects. However, the communities speaking non-standard language are often overlooked by non-inclusive NLP technologies. Recently, there has been a surge of interest in studying diatopic and diachronic changes in dialect NLP, but there is currently no research exploring the intersection of both. Our work aims to fill this gap by systematically reviewing diachronic and diatopic papers from a unified perspective. In this work, we critically assess nine tasks and datasets across five dialects from three language families (Slavic, Romance, and Germanic) in both spoken and written modalities. The tasks covered are diverse, including corpus construction, dialect distance estimation, and dialect geolocation prediction, among others. Moreover, we outline five open challenges regarding changes in dialect use over time, the reliability of dialect datasets, the importance of speaker characteristics, limited coverage of dialects, and ethical considerations in data collection. We hope that our work sheds light on future research towards inclusive computational methods and datasets for language varieties and dialects.