Wiktionary as a Crowdsourced Lexicon for English Dialects

Abstract:This paper evaluates Wiktionary as an ethically crowdsourced lexicon for English dialects. We took a two-phase approach, providing an in-depth descriptive analysis of the crowdsourced lexicon for 12 national varieties of English before applying the lexicon to geo-referenced, country-level social media language data to examine the real-world performance of this crowdsourced dialect lexicon. We demonstrate that Wiktionary matches or exceeds the coverage of traditional dictionaries, such as the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), for regional and Outer-Circle varieties. Our dialect-specific case study on New Zealand English found high alignment between Wiktionary and the OED based on word-formation patterns (R = 0.883). Similarly, we observed high alignment between the dialect lexicon and geo-referenced social media language. While this paper found that Wiktionary has broad coverage of lexical properties, it also highlighted some of the macro-challenges involved in evaluating dialect-responsive language resources and tools, such as the role of language contact in dialects and register effects in web-based corpora.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2608.15641 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2608.15641v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.15641 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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