A4 Refereed article in a conference publication

From Discrete to Continuous Classes: A Situational Analysis of Multilingual Web Registers with LLM Annotations




AuthorsHenriksson, Erik; Myntti, Amanda; Hellström, Saara; Erten-Johansson, Selcen; Eskelinen, Anni; Repo, Liina; Laippala, Veronika

EditorsHämäläinen, Mika; Öhman, Emily; Miyagawa, So; Alnajjar, Khalid; Bizzoni, Yuri

Conference nameInternational Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities

PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics

Publication year2024

Book title Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Natural Language Processing for Digital Humanities

First page 308

Last page318

ISBN979-8-89176-181-0

DOIhttps://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.nlp4dh-1.30

Web address https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.nlp4dh-1.30

Self-archived copy’s web addresshttps://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/477916769


Abstract

In corpus linguistics, registers–language varieties suited to different contexts–have traditionally been defined by their situations of use, yet recent studies reveal significant situational variation within registers. Previous quantitative studies, however, have been limited to English, leaving this variation in other languages largely unexplored. To address this gap, we apply a quantitative situational analysis to a large multilingual web register corpus, using large language models (LLMs) to annotate texts in English, Finnish, French, Swedish, and Turkish for 23 situational parameters. Using clustering techniques, we identify six situational text types, such as “Advice”, “Opinion” and “Marketing”, each characterized by distinct situational features. We explore the relationship between these text types and traditional register categories, finding partial alignment, though no register maps perfectly onto a single cluster. These results support the quantitative approach to situational analysis and are consistent with earlier findings for English. Cross-linguistic comparisons show that language accounts for only a small part of situational variation within registers, suggesting registers are situationally similar across languages. This study demonstrates the utility of LLMs in multilingual register analysis and deepens our understanding of situational variation within registers.


Downloadable publication

This is an electronic reprint of the original article.
This reprint may differ from the original in pagination and typographic detail. Please cite the original version.





Last updated on 2025-14-02 at 16:06