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Oh pssh. There's no such thing as accent strength. There's only accent distance. Accent strength is just an artefact of distance from the accent of a socially d
by ccppurcell 1y ago
Oh pssh. There's no such thing as accent strength. There's only accent distance. Accent strength is just an artefact of distance from the accent of a socially dominant group.
- semiquaver 1y agoWhat a silly nitpick. You’re just using different words to say the same thing.
- ilyausorov 1y agoSure, that's fair. We apply labels that have a connotation of strength based on the distance, but the underlying calculation is indeed based on distance.
- dmurray 1y agoThe article defines accent strength in precisely this way, as the difference "relative to native speakers of English". That group has a vast range of accents, but it's believable that that range occupies an identifiable part of the multi-dimensional accent space, and has very little overlap with, for example, beginner ESL students from China. Even between native speakers, I bet you could come up with some measure of centrality and measure accent strength as a distance from that. And if language families exist upon a continuum - there must be some point on that continuum where you are no longer speaking English, but say Scots or Friesian or Nigerian Creole instead. Accents close to those points are objectively stronger. But there is a lot of freedom in how you measure centrality - if you weight by number of speakers, you might expect to get some mid-American or mid-Atlantic accent, but wind up with the dialect of semi-literate Hyderabad call centre workers.
- ilyausorov 1y agoIndeed, although the inference output of the model is based on the ratings input that we trained it on. And that rating input was done by American English native speakers, so this iteration of the model is centered towards those accents more than e.g. UK or Australian or other accents of English from outside the US.
- joshuaissac 1y ago> relative to native speakers of English > Even between native speakers, I bet you could come up with some measure of centrality and measure accent strength as a distance from that Is that what BoldVoice is actually doing? At least from the article is saying, it is measuring the strength of the user's American English accent (maybe GenAm?), and there is no discussion of any user choice of native accent to target.
- dmurray 1y ago> Is that what BoldVoice is actually doing? No, I don't think it is doing that, I'm just taking issue with cccpurcell, who seems to believe that any definition of accent strength is chauvinistic.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- IshKebab 1y ago> Accent strength is just ... distance from the accent of a socially dominant group. Yes, that is a good definition of accent strength. > There's no such thing as accent strength. ??! You literally just defined it.
- PaulDavisThe1st 1y agoWhich "socially dominant group" would you pick in the United States? Or the UK?
- IshKebab 1y agoNative white middle class, from the South East. BBC accent is fairly neutral these days. If you're American, someone like John Oliver has a very neutral English accent. I'm not American so I don't want to comment on that.