Standard-to-Dialect Transfer Trends Differ Across Text and Speech: A Case Study on Intent and Topic Classification in German Dialects

MCML Authors

Verena Blaschke

→ Group Barbara Plank
 AI and Computational Linguistics

Barbara Plank

Prof. Dr.

Core PI

AI and Computational Linguistics

Abstract

Research on cross-dialectal transfer from a standard to a non-standard dialect variety has typically focused on text data. However, dialects are primarily spoken, and non-standard spellings cause issues in text processing. We compare standard-to-dialect transfer in three settings: text models, speech models, and cascaded systems where speech first gets automatically transcribed and then further processed by a text model. We focus on German dialects in the context of written and spoken intent classification – releasing the first dialectal audio intent classification dataset – with supporting experiments on topic classification. The speech-only setup provides the best results on the dialect data while the text-only setup works best on the standard data. While the cascaded systems lag behind the text-only models for German, they perform relatively well on the dialectal data if the transcription system generates normalized, standard-like output.

inproceedings BWP26

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ACL 2026

64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics. San Diego, CA, USA, Jul 02-07, 2026. To be published. Preprint available.

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Authors

V. Blaschke • M. Winkler • B. Plank

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Links

URL

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Research Area

 B2 | Natural Language Processing