Using a parser as a heuristic tool for the description of New Englishes

Abstract

We propose a novel use of an automatic parser as a tool for descriptive linguistics. This use has two advantages. First, quantitative data on very large amounts of texts are available instantly, a process which would take years of work with manual annotation. Second, it allows variational linguists to use a partly corpus-driven approach, where results emerge from the data. The disadvantage of the parser-based approach is that the level of precision and recall is lower. We give evaluations of precision and recall of the parser we use. Show more