APPLYING A NORMALIZED COMPRESSION METRIC TO THE MEASUREMENT OF DIALECT DISTANCE

Abstract. The paper discusses the application of a similarity metric based on compression to the measurement of the distance among Bulgarian dia-lects. The similarity metric is dened on the basis of the notion of Kolmo-gorov complexity of a le (or binary string). The application of Kolmogorov complexity in practice is not possible because its calculation over a le is an undecidable problem. Thus, the actual similarity metric is based on a real life compressor which only approximates the Kolmogorov complexity. To use the metric for distance measurement of Bulgarian dialects we rst represent the dialectological data in such a way that the metric is applicable. We propose two such representations which are compared to a baseline distance between dialects. Then we conclude the paper with an outline of our future work. 1. Introduction. Th