What Do Dialect Speakers Want? a Survey of Attitudes Towards Language Technology for German Dialects

MCML Authors

Verena Blaschke

→ Group Barbara Plank
 AI and Computational Linguistics

Hinrich Schütze

Prof. Dr.

Principal Investigator

Computational Linguistics

Barbara Plank

Prof. Dr.

Principal Investigator

AI and Computational Linguistics

Abstract

Natural language processing (NLP) has largely focused on modelling standardized languages. More recently, attention has increasingly shifted to local, non-standardized languages and dialects. However, the relevant speaker populations’ needs and wishes with respect to NLP tools are largely unknown. In this paper, we focus on dialects and regional languages related to German – a group of varieties that is heterogeneous in terms of prestige and standardization. We survey speakers of these varieties (N=327) and present their opinions on hypothetical language technologies for their dialects. Although attitudes vary among subgroups of our respondents, we find that respondents are especially in favour of potential NLP tools that work with dialectal input (especially audio input) such as virtual assistants, and less so for applications that produce dialectal output such as machine translation or spellcheckers.

inproceedings

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ACL 2024

62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. Bangkok, Thailand, Aug 11-16, 2024.

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Authors

V. Blaschke • C. Purschke • H. Schütze • B. Plank

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Links

DOI

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Research Area

 B2 | Natural Language Processing