Add Noise, Tasks, or Layers? MaiNLP at the VarDial 2025 Shared Task on Norwegian Dialectal Slot and Intent Detection

Verena Blaschke, Felicia Körner, Barbara Plank


Abstract
Slot and intent detection (SID) is a classic natural language understanding task. Despite this, research has only more recently begun focusing on SID for dialectal and colloquial varieties. Many approaches for low-resource scenarios have not yet been applied to dialectal SID data, or compared to each other on the same datasets. We participate in the VarDial 2025 shared task on slot and intent detection in Norwegian varieties, and compare multiple set-ups: varying the training data (English, Norwegian, or dialectal Norwegian), injecting character-level noise, training on auxiliary tasks, and applying Layer Swapping, a technique in which layers of models fine-tuned on different datasets are assembled into a model. We find noise injection to be beneficial while the effects of auxiliary tasks are mixed. Though some experimentation was required to successfully assemble a model from layers, it worked surprisingly well; a combination of models trained on English and small amounts of dialectal data produced the most robust slot predictions. Our best models achieve 97.6% intent accuracy and 85.6% slot F1 in the shared task.
Anthology ID:
2025.vardial-1.14
Volume:
Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Yves Scherrer, Tommi Jauhiainen, Nikola Ljubešić, Preslav Nakov, Jorg Tiedemann, Marcos Zampieri
Venues:
VarDial | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
182–199
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.vardial-1.14/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Verena Blaschke, Felicia Körner, and Barbara Plank. 2025. Add Noise, Tasks, or Layers? MaiNLP at the VarDial 2025 Shared Task on Norwegian Dialectal Slot and Intent Detection. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, pages 182–199, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Add Noise, Tasks, or Layers? MaiNLP at the VarDial 2025 Shared Task on Norwegian Dialectal Slot and Intent Detection (Blaschke et al., VarDial 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.vardial-1.14.pdf