Object Realisation in Spoken Guadeloupan French: Evaluating NLP Models for an Under-Resourced Variety

Amalia Canes Nápoles, Sophie Repp


Abstract
This paper contributes to the evaluation of natural language parsing models applied to colloquial speech in lesser studied varieties of a language. We are reporting on the performance of speech recognition and of universal dependency (UD) parsing models in a radio corpus of colloquial French spoken in Guadaloupe (GuaFr), which is in contact with a typologically distant language, French-based Guadaloupean Creole (GuaCr). The corpus poses specific challenges due to phonetic and syntactic specifics of GuaFr, as well as the occurrence of code switching to GuaCr. We show weakening the ASR decoder’s language-model (LM) in various parameters avoids hallucination of null objects, which have been described as typical for spoken GuaFr, but not of non-standard object clitic positioning. For UD parsing, we investigate utterance segmentation as the primary lever to affect model performance and compare different segmentation sources (ASR punctuation, manual chunking, UD parser tokenization) and their combination. We highlight both strengths and pitfalls of the models, again focussing on the expression of syntactic objects.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.180
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
2299–2308
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.180/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Amalia Canes Nápoles and Sophie Repp. 2026. Object Realisation in Spoken Guadeloupan French: Evaluating NLP Models for an Under-Resourced Variety. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:2299–2308.
Cite (Informal):
Object Realisation in Spoken Guadeloupan French: Evaluating NLP Models for an Under-Resourced Variety (Canes Nápoles & Repp, LREC 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.180.pdf