HiTZ at VarDial 2025 NorSID: Overcoming Data Scarcity with Language Transfer and Automatic Data Annotation

Jaione Bengoetxea, Mikel Zubillaga, Ekhi Azurmendi, Maite Heredia, Julen Etxaniz, Markel Ferro, Jeremy Barnes


Abstract
In this paper we present our submission for the NorSID Shared Task as part of the 2025 VarDial Workshop, consisting of three tasks: Intent Detection, Slot Filling and Dialect Identification, evaluated using data in different dialects of the Norwegian language. For Intent Detection and Slot Filling, we have fine-tuned a multitask model in a cross-lingual setting, to leverage the xSID dataset available in 17 languages. In the case of Dialect Identification, our final submission consists of a model fine-tuned on the provided development set, which has obtained the highest scores within our experiments. Our final results on the test set show that our models do not drop in performance compared to the development set, likely due to the domain-specificity of the dataset and the similar distribution of both subsets. Finally, we also report an in-depth analysis of the provided datasets and their artifacts, as well as other sets of experiments that have been carried out but did not yield the best results. Additionally, we present an analysis on the reasons why some methods have been more successful than others; mainly the impact of the combination of languages and domain-specificity of the training data on the results.
Anthology ID:
2025.vardial-1.16
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:
209–219
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.vardial-1.16/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jaione Bengoetxea, Mikel Zubillaga, Ekhi Azurmendi, Maite Heredia, Julen Etxaniz, Markel Ferro, and Jeremy Barnes. 2025. HiTZ at VarDial 2025 NorSID: Overcoming Data Scarcity with Language Transfer and Automatic Data Annotation. In Proceedings of the 12th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, pages 209–219, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
HiTZ at VarDial 2025 NorSID: Overcoming Data Scarcity with Language Transfer and Automatic Data Annotation (Bengoetxea et al., VarDial 2025)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.vardial-1.16.pdf