Machine Translation of Low-Resource Spoken Dialects: Strategies for Normalizing Swiss German

The goal of this work is to design a machine translation (MT) system for a low-resource family of dialects, collectively known as Swiss German, which are widely spoken in Switzerland but seldom written. We collected a significant number of parallel written resources to start with, up to a total of about 60k words. Moreover, we identified several other promising data sources for Swiss German. Then, we designed and compared three strategies for normalizing Swiss German input in order to address the regional diversity. We found that character-based neural MT was the best solution for text normalization. In combination with phrase-based statistical MT, our solution reached 36% BLEU score when translating from the Bernese dialect. This value, however, decreases as the testing data becomes more remote from the training one, geographically and topically. These resources and normalization techniques are a first step towards full MT of Swiss German dialects.Comment: 11th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC), 7-12 May 2018, Miyazaki (Japan

The Germanic weak preterit

The main difficulty with the Germanic weak preterit is that one cannot endeavor an explanation of its origin without taking into account almost every aspect of the historical phonology and morphology of the Germanic languages. In the following I intend to show how a number of problems receive a natural explanation in a unified treatment on the basis of earlier studies. The theory presented here is not revolutionary, but aims at integrating earlier findings into a coherent whole. There is no reason to give a detailed account of the scholarly literature, which is easily accessible (cf. Tops 1974, Bammesberger 1986)

Vowel and consonant quantity in two Swiss German dialects and their corresponding varieties of Standard German: effects of region, age, and tempo

The diglossic situation in German-speaking Switzerland entails that both an Alemannic dialect and a Swiss standard variety of German are spoken. One phonological property of both Alemannic and Swiss Standard German (SSG) is contrastive quantity not only in vowels but also in consonants, namely lenis and fortis. This study aims to compare vowel and plosive closure durations as well as articulation rate (AR) between Alemannic and SSG in the varieties spoken in a rural area of the canton of Lucerne (LU) and an urban area of the canton of Zurich (ZH). In addition to the segment durations, an additional measure of vowel-to-vowel + consonant duration (V/(V + C)) ratios is calculated in order to account for possible compensation between vowel and closure durations. Stimuli consisted of words containing different vowel-consonant (VC) combinations. The main differences found are longer segment durations in Alemannic compared to SSG, three phonetic vowel categories in Alemannic that differ between LU and ZH, three stable V/(V + C) ratio categories, and three phonetic consonant categories lenis, fortis, and extrafortis in both Alemannic and SSG. Most importantly, younger ZH speakers produced overall shorter closure durations, calling into question a possible reduction of consonant categories due to a contact to German Standard German (GSG)

The origin of the Goths

Witold Ma´nczak has argued that Gothic is closer to Upper German than to Middle German, closer to High German than to Low German, closer to German than to Scandinavian, closer to Danish than to Swedish, and that the original homeland of the Goths must therefore be located in the southernmost part of the Germanic territories, not in Scandinavia (1982, 1984, 1987a, 1987b, 1992). I think that his argument is correct and that it is time to abandon Iordanes’ classic view that the Goths came from Scandinavia. We must therefore reconsider the grounds for adopting the latter position and the reasons why it always has remained popular

Standard oder dialekt? eine neue online elizitations-technik

In dialectology, it is often necessary to obtain a measure for the level of dialectal accent shown by individual speakers, especially if statistical analysis is needed. This also applies to studies on standard variants which are “coloured” by regiolects or dialects. In this paper I explore the feasibility of letting native speakers judge the degree of accentedness in Low-Alemannic German. Specifically, I investigate whether listeners who speak a similar dialect as the speakers who are evaluated assign different judgements than listeners who do not. A novel methodology is applied, which involves an on-line elicitation task using audio files. This experiment shows that listeners who speak different varieties of German form a homogeneous group, with respect to rating the level of accent.In der Dialektologie wird häufig ein Maß für den Grad des dialektalen Akzents einzelner Sprecher benötigt, insbesondere, wenn eine statistische Analyse benötigt wird. Das gilt auch für Studien über Standardvarietäten, die durch Regiolekte oder Dialekte "gefärbt" sind. In diesem Artikel prüfe ich, inwieweit es möglich ist, Muttersprachler den dialektalen Akzent in nieder-alemannischem Deutsch einschätzen zu lassen. Insbesondere untersuche ich, ob Hörer, die einen ähnlichen Dialekt wie die bewerteten Sprecher sprechen, zu anderen Urteilen kommen als Hörer, die keinen ähnlichen Dialekt sprechen. Eine neuartige Methode mit einer Online-Elizitations-Aufgabe anhand von Audio-Dateien kommt zum Einsatz. Das Experiment zeigt, dass Hörer, die verschiedene Varietäten des Deutschen sprechen, den erhobenen Bewertungen nach eine homogene Gruppe bilden

Conservative and innovative dialect areas

The present paper focuses on conservative and innovative (transitional) dialect areas and the questions of 1) how such areas can be methodologically visualized and 2) how the outcomes can be interpreted. In the first part of this paper a geostatistical method of representing phonological features in space will be introduced: interpolation. This method is not entirely new to dialectology; it has been quite neglected, though, in comparison to other methods of mapping, such as the isogloss or dot symbol method that was mainly used in traditional dialect atlases. The interpolation method will be applied to a large corpus of spontaneous speech data from rural dialects spoken in southwest Germany. Methodological steps in data processing will be described, resulting in a data set that can be used as input for statistical analysis and the visual depiction of variation in space as interpolated grid plots. In the second part results will be discussed. The major outcome consists of an aggregate interpolation plot that includes variables from fifteen different etymological sound classes. These sound classes can be used for demonstrating the distribution of receding phonological variables in space. The interpolation shows two conservative areas where receding forms are still widespread. They lie within the centers of the two major dialect groups of southwest Germany: Alemannic and Swabian. The conservative areas are separated by a broad transitional zone characterized by intense variation between receding and innovative variants. It will be argued that this transitional zone is not due to the horizontal spread of the dialects into each other’s areas alone. Rather, variation is triggered by vertical standard influence that supports any dialect form to spread out horizontally as long as it is phonologically identical or similar to the standard form