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.

A large amount of local and culture-specific knowledge (e.g., people, traditions, food) can only be found in documents written in dialects. While there has been extensive research conducted on cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR), the field of cross-dialect retrieval (CDIR) has received limited attention. Dialect retrieval poses unique challenges due to the limited availability of resources to train retrieval models and the high variability in non-standardized languages. We study these challenges on the example of German dialects and introduce the first German dialect retrieval dataset, dubbed WikiDIR, which consists of seven German dialects extracted from Wikipedia. Using WikiDIR, we demonstrate the weakness of lexical methods in dealing with high lexical variation in dialects. We further show that commonly used CLIR methods such as query translation or zero-shot cross-lingual transfer with multilingual encoders do not transfer well to extremely low-resource setups, motivating the need for resource-lean and dialect-specific retrieval models.

We explore the potential of pixel-based models for transfer learning from standard languages to dialects. These models convert text into images that are divided into patches, enabling a continuous vocabulary representation that proves especially useful for out-of-vocabulary words common in dialectal data. Using German as a case study, we compare the performance of pixel-based models to token-based models across various syntactic and semantic tasks. Our results show that pixel-based models outperform token-based models in part-of-speech tagging, dependency parsing and intent detection for zero-shot dialect evaluation by up to 26 percentage points in some scenarios, though not in Standard German. However, pixel-based models fall short in topic classification. These findings emphasize the potential of pixel-based models for handling dialectal data, though further research should be conducted to assess their effectiveness in various linguistic contexts.

Although Germany has a diverse landscape of dialects, they are underrepresented in current automatic speech recognition (ASR) research. To enable studies of how robust models are towards dialectal variation, we present Betthupferl, an evaluation dataset containing four hours of read speech in three dialect groups spoken in Southeast Germany (Franconian, Bavarian, Alemannic), and half an hour of Standard German speech. We provide both dialectal and Standard German transcriptions, and analyze the linguistic differences between them. We benchmark several multilingual state-of-the-art ASR models on speech translation into Standard German, and find differences between how much the output resembles the dialectal vs. standardized transcriptions. Qualitative error analyses of the best ASR model reveal that it sometimes normalizes grammatical differences, but often stays closer to the dialectal constructions.

Despite the success of the Universal Dependencies (UD) project exemplified by its impressive language breadth, there is still a lack in ‘within-language breadth’: most treebanks focus on standard languages. Even for German, the language with the most annotations in UD, so far no treebank exists for one of its language varieties spoken by over 10M people: Bavarian. To contribute to closing this gap, we present the first multi-dialect Bavarian treebank (MaiBaam) manually annotated with part-of-speech and syntactic dependency information in UD, covering multiple text genres (wiki, fiction, grammar examples, social, non-fiction). We highlight the morphosyntactic differences between the closely-related Bavarian and German and showcase the rich variability of speakers’ orthographies. Our corpus includes 15k tokens, covering dialects from all Bavarian-speaking areas spanning three countries. We provide baseline parsing and POS tagging results, which are lower than results obtained on German and vary substantially between different graph-based parsers. To support further research on Bavarian syntax, we make our dataset, language-specific guidelines and code publicly available.

Named Entity Recognition (NER) is a fundamental task to extract key information from texts, but annotated resources are scarce for dialects. This paper introduces the first dialectal NER dataset for German, BarNER, with 161K tokens annotated on Bavarian Wikipedia articles (bar-wiki) and tweets (bar-tweet), using a schema adapted from German CoNLL 2006 and GermEval. The Bavarian dialect differs from standard German in lexical distribution, syntactic construction, and entity information. We conduct in-domain, cross-domain, sequential, and joint experiments on two Bavarian and three German corpora and present the first comprehensive NER results on Bavarian. Incorporating knowledge from the larger German NER (sub-)datasets notably improves on bar-wiki and moderately on bar-tweet. Inversely, training first on Bavarian contributes slightly to the seminal German CoNLL 2006 corpus. Moreover, with gold dialect labels on Bavarian tweets, we assess multi-task learning between five NER and two Bavarian-German dialect identification tasks and achieve NER SOTA on bar-wiki. We substantiate the necessity of our low-resource BarNER corpus and the importance of diversity in dialects, genres, and topics in enhancing model performance.

Mainstream cross-lingual task-oriented dialogue (ToD) systems leverage the transfer learning paradigm by training a joint model for intent recognition and slot-filling in English and applying it, zero-shot, to other languages.We address a gap in prior research, which often overlooked the transfer to lower-resource colloquial varieties due to limited test data.Inspired by prior work on English varieties, we craft and manually evaluate perturbation rules that transform German sentences into colloquial forms and use them to synthesize test sets in four ToD datasets.Our perturbation rules cover 18 distinct language phenomena, enabling us to explore the impact of each perturbation on slot and intent performance.Using these new datasets, we conduct an experimental evaluation across six different transformers.Here, we demonstrate that when applied to colloquial varieties, ToD systems maintain their intent recognition performance, losing 6% (4.62 percentage points) in accuracy on average.However, they exhibit a significant drop in slot detection, with a decrease of 31% (21 percentage points) in slot F 1 score.Our findings are further supported by a transfer experiment from Standard American English to synthetic Urban African American Vernacular English.