Standard German Subtitling of Swiss German TV content: the PASSAGE Project

Jonathan David Mutal, Pierrette Bouillon, Johanna Gerlach, Veronika Haberkorn

Abstract
In Switzerland, two thirds of the population speak Swiss German, a primarily spoken language with no standardised written form. It is widely used on Swiss TV, for example in news reports, interviews or talk shows, and subtitles are required for people who cannot understand this spoken language. This paper focuses on the task of automatic Standard German subtitling of spoken Swiss German, and more specifically on the translation of a normalised Swiss German speech recognition result into Standard German suitable for subtitles. Our contribution consists of a comparison of different statistical and deep learning MT systems for this task and an aligned corpus of normalised Swiss German and Standard German subtitles. Results of two evaluations, automatic and human, show that the systems succeed in improving the content, but are currently not capable of producing entirely correct Standard German.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.541
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
5063–5070
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.541
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jonathan David Mutal, Pierrette Bouillon, Johanna Gerlach, and Veronika Haberkorn. 2022. Standard German Subtitling of Swiss German TV content: the PASSAGE Project. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 5063–5070, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Standard German Subtitling of Swiss German TV content: the PASSAGE Project (Mutal et al., LREC 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-dup-bibkey/2022.lrec-1.541.pdf
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