Applying the Levenshtein Distance to Catalan dialects: A brief comparison of two dialectometric approaches

Abstract

In recent years, dialectometry has gained interest among Catalan dialectologists. As a consequence, a specific dialectometric approach has been developed at the University of Barcelona, which aims at increasing the accuracy of final groupings by means of discriminating the predictable components of the language from its unpredictable ones. Another popular method to obtain dialect distances is the Levenshtein distance (LD) which has never been applied to a Catalan corpus so far.The goal of this paper is to present the results of applying the LD to a corpus of Catalan linguistic data, and to compare the results from this analysis both with the results from Barcelona and the traditional classifications of Catalan dialectology