Johnatan Bonilla

I am a research associate in project A09, which focuses on register and dialect variation in Canarian Spanish. My research interests include corpus linguistics, computational linguistics, and the intersection of sociolinguistics, dialectology, and natural language processing (NLP).

I hold a PhD in Linguistics from Ghent University and a Master’s in Linguistics from the Instituto Caro y Cuervo (Colombia). Previously, I led projects on dialectology, lexicography, and NLP, including the digitization of the Linguistic and Ethnographic Atlas of Colombia (ALEC), the development of the New Linguistic Atlas of Colombia (NALAC), and the creation of the first morphosyntactic treebank for spoken Spanish (COSER-UD).

Repositories

GitHub | HuggingFace | UD Spanish-COSER

Previous Projects

• Linguistic Atlas of Colombia (ALEC)
• Juegos del Español

Recent Publications

• Bonilla J.E., Merino Hernández, L. M., Marttinnen Larsson., M. (2025). BERT’s Interpretation of Literalmente ‘Literally’: What Deep Learning Models Can Tell Us about Synchronic Layering and Diachronic Shifts. Cognitive Semantics. https://doi.org/10.1163/23526416-bja10079
• Monsalve Muñoz, U. de C., Bonilla, J.E., Rubio López, R.Y., Luna Cortés, A. S. (2025). LEXICC: The Design and Development of an Online Dictionary Writing System. Lexikos. https://doi.org/10.5788/35-1-1989
• Bonilla, J. E. (2024). Spoken Spanish PoS tagging: Gold standard dataset. Language Resources and Evaluation. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-024-09751-x
• Fernández, J. O., Bonilla, J. E., & Rocha, L. Á. (2024). The influence of geographic variables in linguistic variation. Dialectologia. https://doi.org/10.1344/DIALECTOLOGIA2023.32.7
• Bouzouita, M., Bonilla, J. E., & Segundo Díaz, R. L. (2024). Gaming for dialects: Creating an annotated and parsed corpus of European Spanish dialects through GWAPs. In Linguistic Corpora and Big Data in Spanish and Portuguese. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110781465-005
• Bonilla, J. E., Segundo Díaz, R. L., & Bouzouita, M. (2023). Using GWAPs for verifying PoS tagging of spoken dialectal Spanish. In Conference paper. https://doi.org/10.1109/besc59560.2023.10386542
• Bonilla, J. E. (2023). Superdialectos, dialectos y subdialectos del español de Colombia. Lexis. https://doi.org/10.18800/lexis.202302.002
• Segundo Díaz, R. L., Bonilla, J. E., Bouzouita, M., & Rovelo Ruiz, G. (2023). Juegos con propósito para la anotación del Corpus Oral Sonoro del Español rural. Dialectologia et Geolinguistica. https://doi.org/10.1515/dialect-2023-0007