@inproceedings{franzini-ducceschi-2026-south,
    title = "South Tyrolean Dialect-to-Standard Speech Translation: A Resource",
    author = "Franzini, Greta H.  and
      Ducceschi, Luca",
    editor = "Anastasopoulos, Antonis  and
      Markantonatou, Stella  and
      Ralli, Angela  and
      Zampieri, Marcos  and
      Bompolas, Stavros  and
      Stamou, Vivian",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dialects in {NLP} {---} A Resource Perspective",
    month = may,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Palma de Mallorca",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/revision-workflow/2026.dialres-1.19/",
    doi = "10.63317/3visgk9f8s7z",
    pages = "188--194",
    abstract = "This paper presents a developing oral resource for South Tyrolean, a German dialect spoken in Northern Italy. The dialect is ubiquitous in spoken communication but lacks a standardised orthography. In this context, strict transcription into dialect is of limited to no utility to the local community. Instead, there is a distinct and strong demand for technology capable of directly translating spoken dialect into Standard German. To address this specific need, we introduce a dynamic, incrementally growing dataset designed to fine-tune ASR models for this translation task. Our corpus aggregates diverse sources, including media and research interviews, totalling over 13 hours of aligned audio. We describe a collaborative workflow where community partners contribute audio archives in exchange for automated transcriptions, creating a virtuous cycle of data improvement. Additionally, we detail our iterative model fine-tuning strategy, data collection challenges and the resulting improvements in model performance."
}