用连续地理空间建模阿拉伯语方言,精准预测说话人位置。
Learning the Arabic Dialect Continuum as a Continuous Space: A Regression Approach to Speaker Origin Prediction

- 将方言差异视为连续地理空间,通过回归预测经纬度坐标。
- 中位定位误差481.2公里,城市识别准确率45.2%。
- 支持方言连续体假说,适合研究语言地理与跨域泛化。
我们提出一种基于回归的阿拉伯语方言地理定位方法,将方言变异建模为连续地理空间而非离散类别。通过融合帧级XLS-R-300M和Whisper-large-v3编码器表示与音系特征,利用Transformer编码器和可学习注意力池化查询预测连续纬度-经度坐标。采用球面测地线损失直接优化地球表面的大圆距离,避免平面坐标回归带来的畸变。在按源录音分组的无泄露五折分组交叉验证下,模型取得481.2公里的总体中位定位误差。辅助的国家与城市分类头分别达到64.5%和45.2%准确率。对学习到的隐空间进行置换曼德尔检验,定量支持阿拉伯语方言连续体假说。为进一步测试真实泛化能力,引入城市掩码协议:每折移除两个城市用于训练但保留在验证集。在此零样本设置下,平均误差上升至1173.3公里,相较已见城市恶化1.32倍。研究结果确立了连续地理建模在阿拉伯语方言定位中的合理性,并量化其优势与仍存的巨大提升空间。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
We present a regression-based approach to Arabic dialect geolocation that models dialectal variation as a continuous geographic space rather than discrete categories. Speaker origin is predicted as continuous latitude-longitude coordinates using a hierarchical neural architecture that fuses frame-level XLS-R-300M and Whisper-large-v3 encoder representations with phonotactic descriptors through a Transformer encoder and a learnable attention-pooled query. A spherical geodesic loss directly optimizes great-circle distance on Earth's surface, avoiding distortions inherent to planar coordinate regression. Under a leakage-free 5-fold GroupKFold protocol grouped by source recording, our model attains a pooled median localization error of 481.2 km. Auxiliary country and city heads reach 64.5% and 45.2% accuracy, respectively. A permutation Mantel test on the learned latent space provides quantitative support for the Arabic dialect continuum hypothesis. To probe true generalization, we further introduce a city-masking protocol in which two cities per fold are removed from training but retained in validation. Under this zero-shot regime, the mean error rises to 1173.3 km, a 1.32x degradation relative to seen cities. Our findings establish continuous geographic modeling as a principled framework for Arabic dialect geolocation and quantify both its strengths and the substantial headroom that remains.
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