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        <title>Meenz bleibt Meenz, but Large Language Models Do Not Speak Its Dialect</title>
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            <title>Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference</title>
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    <abstract>Meenzerisch, the dialect spoken in the German city of Mainz, is also the traditional language of the Mainz carnival, a yearly celebration well known throughout Germany. However, Meenzerisch is on the verge of dying out—a fate it shares with many other German dialects. Natural language processing (NLP) has the potential to help with the preservation and revival efforts of languages and dialects. However, so far no NLP research has looked at Meenzerisch. This work presents the first research in the field of NLP that is explicitly focused on the dialect of Mainz. We introduce a digital dictionary—an NLP-ready dataset derived from an existing resource—to support researchers in modeling and benchmarking the language. It contains 2,351 words in the dialect paired with their meanings described in Standard German. We then use this dataset to answer the following research questions: (1) Can state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) generate definitions for dialect words? (2) Can LLMs generate words in Meenzerisch, given their definitions? Our experiments show that LLMs can do neither: the best model for definitions reaches only 6.27% accuracy and the best word generation model’s accuracy is 1.51%. We then conduct two additional experiments in order to see if accuracy is improved by few-shot learning and by extracting rules from the training set, which are then passed to the LLM. While those approaches are able to improve the results, accuracy remains below 10%. This highlights that additional resources and an intensification of research efforts focused on German dialects are desperately needed.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Meenz bleibt Meenz, but Large Language Models Do Not Speak Its Dialect
%A Bui, Minh Duc
%A Mager, Manuel
%A Kann, Peter Herbert
%A von der Wense, Katharina
%Y Piperidis, Stelios
%Y Bel, Núria
%Y van den Heuvel, Henk
%Y Ide, Nancy
%Y Krek, Simon
%Y Toral, Antonio
%S Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
%D 2026
%8 May
%I ELRA Language Resource Association
%C Palma de Mallorca, Spain
%F bui-etal-2026-meenz
%X Meenzerisch, the dialect spoken in the German city of Mainz, is also the traditional language of the Mainz carnival, a yearly celebration well known throughout Germany. However, Meenzerisch is on the verge of dying out—a fate it shares with many other German dialects. Natural language processing (NLP) has the potential to help with the preservation and revival efforts of languages and dialects. However, so far no NLP research has looked at Meenzerisch. This work presents the first research in the field of NLP that is explicitly focused on the dialect of Mainz. We introduce a digital dictionary—an NLP-ready dataset derived from an existing resource—to support researchers in modeling and benchmarking the language. It contains 2,351 words in the dialect paired with their meanings described in Standard German. We then use this dataset to answer the following research questions: (1) Can state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) generate definitions for dialect words? (2) Can LLMs generate words in Meenzerisch, given their definitions? Our experiments show that LLMs can do neither: the best model for definitions reaches only 6.27% accuracy and the best word generation model’s accuracy is 1.51%. We then conduct two additional experiments in order to see if accuracy is improved by few-shot learning and by extracting rules from the training set, which are then passed to the LLM. While those approaches are able to improve the results, accuracy remains below 10%. This highlights that additional resources and an intensification of research efforts focused on German dialects are desperately needed.
%R 10.63317/4foh8f7kygj8
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.258/
%U https://doi.org/10.63317/4foh8f7kygj8
%P 3281-3294

Markdown (Informal)

[Meenz bleibt Meenz, but Large Language Models Do Not Speak Its Dialect](https://aclanthology.org/2026.lrec-1.258/) (Bui et al., LREC 2026)

• Meenz bleibt Meenz, but Large Language Models Do Not Speak Its Dialect (Bui et al., LREC 2026)

ACL

• Minh Duc Bui, Manuel Mager, Peter Herbert Kann, and Katharina von der Wense. 2026. Meenz bleibt Meenz, but Large Language Models Do Not Speak Its Dialect. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 3281–3294, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.