Discovering dialectal differences based on oral corpora

International audienceThis paper discusses a method to detect statistically significant linguistic differences between corpora while factoring in possible variability within the very corpora to be compared. Specifically, we compare two small corpora of dialects of Even, Bystraja and Lamunkhin Even, in an attempt to identify morphemes that are more frequent in either of the corpora. To investigate whether this difference might be due to an over-representation of a speaker who happens to be an outlier in terms of using a particular morpheme, we use DP, a measurement of evenness of the distribution of a specific linguistic feature across subcorpora of the same corpus