Definition: In this task, you are given a part of an article. Your task is to generate headline (title) for this text. Preferred headlines are under fifteen words.
Input: Quantifying the degree of spatial dependence for linguistic variables is a key task for analyzing dialectal variation. However, existing approaches have important drawbacks. First, they make unjustified assumptions about the nature of spatial variation: some assume that the geographical distribution of linguistic variables is Gaussian, while others assume that linguistic variation is aligned to pre-defined geopolitical units such as states or counties. Second, they are not applicable to all types of linguistic data: some approaches apply only to frequencies, others to boolean indicators of whether a linguistic variable is present. We present a new method for measuring geographical language variation, which solves both of these problems. Our approach builds on reproducing kernel Hilbert space (RKHS) representations for nonparametric statistics, and takes the form of a test statistic that is computed from pairs of individual geotagged observations without aggregation into predefined geographical bins. We compare this test with prior work using synthetic data as well as a diverse set of real datasets: a corpus of Dutch tweets, a Dutch syntactic atlas, and a dataset of letters to the editor in North American newspapers. Our proposed test is shown to support robust inferences across a broad range of scenarios and types of data.

A Kernel Independence Test for Geographical Language Variation