Dialect Normalization using Large Language Models and Morphological Rules

Antonios Dimakis, John Pavlopoulos, Antonios Anastasopoulos


Abstract
Natural language understanding systems struggle with low-resource languages, including many dialects of high-resource ones. Dialect-to-standard normalization attempts to tackle this issue by transforming dialectal text so that it can be used by standard-language tools downstream. In this study, we tackle this task by introducing a new normalization method that combines rule-based linguistically informed transformations and large language models (LLMs) with targeted few-shot prompting, without requiring any parallel data. We implement our method for Greek dialects and apply it on a dataset of regional proverbs, evaluating the outputs using human annotators. We then use this dataset to conduct downstream experiments, finding that previous results regarding these proverbs relied solely on superficial linguistic information, including orthographic artifacts, while new observations can still be made through the remaining semantics.
Anthology ID:
2025.findings-acl.1215
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
23696–23714
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.1215/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Antonios Dimakis, John Pavlopoulos, and Antonios Anastasopoulos. 2025. Dialect Normalization using Large Language Models and Morphological Rules. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, pages 23696–23714, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Dialect Normalization using Large Language Models and Morphological Rules (Dimakis et al., Findings 2025)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/landing_page/2025.findings-acl.1215.pdf