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

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11968v2
• Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2024 13:05:01 GMT
• Title: What Do Dialect Speakers Want? A Survey of Attitudes Towards Language Technology for German Dialects
• Authors: Verena Blaschke, Christoph Purschke, Hinrich Schütze, Barbara Plank,
• Abstract summary: We survey speakers of dialects and regional languages related to German. We find that respondents are especially in favour of potential NLP tools that work with dialectal input.
• Score: 60.8361859783634
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• 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.

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