@inproceedings{blaschke-etal-2025-add,
    title = "Add Noise, Tasks, or Layers? {M}ai{NLP} at the {V}ar{D}ial 2025 Shared Task on {N}orwegian Dialectal Slot and Intent Detection",
    author = {Blaschke, Verena  and
      K{\"o}rner, Felicia  and
      Plank, Barbara},
    editor = "Scherrer, Yves  and
      Jauhiainen, Tommi  and
      Ljube{\v{s}}i{\'c}, Nikola  and
      Nakov, Preslav  and
      Tiedemann, Jorg  and
      Zampieri, Marcos",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects",
    month = jan,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Abu Dhabi, UAE",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/add-emnlp-2024-awards/2025.vardial-1.14/",
    pages = "182--199",
    abstract = "Slot and intent detection (SID) is a classic natural language understanding task. Despite this, research has only more recently begun focusing on SID for dialectal and colloquial varieties. Many approaches for low-resource scenarios have not yet been applied to dialectal SID data, or compared to each other on the same datasets. We participate in the VarDial 2025 shared task on slot and intent detection in Norwegian varieties, and compare multiple set-ups: varying the training data (English, Norwegian, or dialectal Norwegian), injecting character-level noise, training on auxiliary tasks, and applying Layer Swapping, a technique in which layers of models fine-tuned on different datasets are assembled into a model. We find noise injection to be beneficial while the effects of auxiliary tasks are mixed. Though some experimentation was required to successfully assemble a model from layers, it worked surprisingly well; a combination of models trained on English and small amounts of dialectal data produced the most robust slot predictions. Our best models achieve 97.6{\%} intent accuracy and 85.6{\%} slot F1 in the shared task."
}