@inproceedings{de-langhe-etal-2025-modeling,
    title = "Modeling Syntactic Dependencies in {S}outhern {D}utch Dialects",
    author = "De Langhe, Loic  and
      Degraeuwe, Jasper  and
      Farasyn, Melissa  and
      Hoste, Veronique",
    editor = "Haji{\v{c}}ov{\'a}, Eva  and
      Kahane, Sylvain",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Dependency Linguistics (Depling, SyntaxFest 2025)",
    month = aug,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Ljubljana, Slovenia",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/mtsummit-25-ingestion/2025.depling-1.3/",
    pages = "24--35",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-290-9",
    abstract = "Dependency parsing of non-normative language varieties remains a challenge for modern NLP. While contemporary parsers excel at standardized languages, dialectal variation {--} especially in function words, conjunctives, and verb clustering {--} introduces syntactic ambiguity that disrupts traditional parsing approaches. In this paper, we conduct a quantitative evaluation of syntactic dependencies in Southern Dutch dialects, leveraging a standardized dialect corpus to isolate syntactic effects from lexical variation. Using a neural biaffine dependency parser with various mono- and multilingual transformer-based encoders, we benchmark parsing performance on standard Dutch, dialectal data, and mixed training sets. Our results demonstrate that incorporating dialect-specific data significantly enhances parsing accuracy, yet certain syntactic structures remain difficult to resolve, even with dedicated adaptation. These findings highlight the need for more nuanced parsing strategies and improved syntactic modeling for non-normative language varieties."
}