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home / papers / 2026 / Can I guess where you are from? Modeling dialectal morphosyntactic similarities in Brazilian Portuguese

Can I guess where you are from? Modeling dialectal morphosyntactic similarities in Brazilian Portuguese

Paper · 2026 · Manoel Siqueira and Raquel Freitag

Summary

The paper asks whether a Brazilian Portuguese speaker's regional origin can be inferred from how several grammatical variables behave together, rather than from any single feature. The authors examine four second-person phenomena: the subject pronoun (você/cê/tu), the clitic (te/lhe), the possessive (seu/teu and inflections), and whether an article precedes the possessive. The data come from three samples of the Falares Sergipanos dataset, which are semi-spontaneous sociolinguistic interviews with UFS university students. Speakers are grouped into four mobility ("displacement") profiles that serve as a proxy for dialectal origin. Occurrences were found with spaCy pattern rules and then validated by human annotators. Analyses in R compared pairwise correlation with clustering of speakers based on their morphosyntactic profiles. Correlation revealed only a few limited associations between variables. Clustering produced speaker groups that partly track regional patterns, although group homogeneity stayed below the authors' target. The work matters for building language technology that does not penalize dialectal speech. It also argues that ethically collected, human-transcribed corpora are needed instead of web-scraped or purely ASR-transcribed data.

Key points

  • Data: the Deslocamentos 2019, Deslocamentos 2020 and Linguagem Corporificada 2023 samples from Falares Sergipanos, covering 181 speakers aged 18–30 and 1,002,535 words, transcribed by humans in ELAN.
  • The four variables (pro2P, clit2P, poss2P, det-poss) together yield 24 possible combinations. Extraction used spaCy Matcher-style rules over POS, lemma and morphological features (e.g., VerbForm=Fin, PronType=Prs).
  • The displacement profiles cover four groups: Aracaju metropolitan natives, daily commuters from inland Sergipe, inland-born students living in Aracaju, and students from other states (mainly Bahia and Alagoas).
  • The principal components explained 58.9% of variance. The clustering did not reach the expected ≥75% homogeneity within mobility groups, which the authors attribute partly to small sample size.
  • Stated limitations include the focus on morphosyntax only and the restriction to young students. The authors propose the Plataforma da Diversidade Linguística Brasileira (LGPD-compliant, FAIR) as a future source of larger data for supervised, neural, transfer or few-shot approaches.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

Also on the byline: Universidade Federal de Alagoas · Universidade Federal de Sergipe.

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 2The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

Cite

Cite as Manoel Siqueira and Raquel Freitag. 2026. Can I guess where you are from? Modeling dialectal morphosyntactic similarities in Brazilian Portuguese. Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 1.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

@inproceedings{siqueira2026can,
  title = {{Can I guess where you are from? Modeling dialectal morphosyntactic similarities in Brazilian Portuguese}},
  author = {Manoel Siqueira and Raquel Freitag},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Computational Processing of Portuguese (PROPOR 2026) - Vol. 1},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://aclanthology.org/2026.propor-1.59/}
}

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