A Catalog of Basque Dialectal Resources: Online Collections and Standard-to-Dialectal Adaptations

Jaione Bengoetxea, Itziar Gonzalez-Dios, Rodrigo Agerri


Abstract
Recent research on dialectal NLP has identified data scarcity as a primary limitation. To address this limitation, this paper presents a catalog of contemporary Basque dialectal data and resources, offering a systematic and comprehensive compilation of the dialectal data currently available in Basque. Two types of data sources have been distinguished: online data originally written in some dialect, and standard-to-dialect adapted data. The former includes all dialectal data that can be found online, such as news and radio sites, informal tweets, as well as online resources such as dictionaries, atlases, grammar rules, or videos. The latter consists of data that has been adapted from the standard variety to dialectal varieties, either manually or automatically. Regarding the manual adaptation, the test split of the XNLI Natural Language Inference dataset was manually adapted into three Basque dialects: Western, Central, and Navarrese-Lapurdian, yielding a high-quality parallel gold standard evaluation dataset. With respect to the automatic dialectal adaptation, the automatically adapted physical commonsense dataset (BasPhyCowest) underwent additional manual evaluation by native speakers to assess its quality and determine whether it could serve as a viable substitute for full manual adaptation (i.e., silver data creation).
Anthology ID:
2026.dialres-1.16
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dialects in NLP — A Resource Perspective
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca
Editors:
Antonis Anastasopoulos, Stella Markantonatou, Angela Ralli, Marcos Zampieri, Stavros Bompolas, Vivian Stamou
Venues:
DialRes | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
153–164
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-ws-dialres-16
DOI:
10.63317/3zhrab5powcg
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jaione Bengoetxea, Itziar Gonzalez-Dios, and Rodrigo Agerri. 2026. A Catalog of Basque Dialectal Resources: Online Collections and Standard-to-Dialectal Adaptations. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dialects in NLP — A Resource Perspective, pages 153–164, Palma de Mallorca. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Catalog of Basque Dialectal Resources: Online Collections and Standard-to-Dialectal Adaptations (Bengoetxea et al., DialRes 2026)
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