Andreas Simons


2024

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Highly Granular Dialect Normalization and Phonological Dialect Translation for Limburgish
Andreas Simons | Stefano De Pascale | Karlien Franco
Proceedings of the Eleventh Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties, and Dialects (VarDial 2024)

We study highly granular dialect normalization and phonological dialect translation on Limburgish, a non-standardized low-resource language with a wide variation in spelling conventions and phonology. We find improvements to the traditional transformer by embedding the geographic coordinates of dialects in dialect normalization tasks and use these geographically-embedded transformers to translate words between the phonologies of different dialects. These results are found to be consistent with notions in traditional Limburgish dialectology.