A review of corpus-based statistical models of language variation

Abstract

This paper is a brief review of the research on language variation using corpus data and statistical modeling methods. The variation phenomena covered in this review include phonetic variation (in spontaneous speech) and syntactic variation, with a focus on studies of English and Chinese. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate the use of corpus-driven statistical models in the study of language variation, and discuss the contribution and future directions of this line of research.