ArchiMob - A Corpus of Spoken Swiss German

Tanja Samardžić, Yves Scherrer, Elvira Glaser


Abstract
Swiss dialects of German are, unlike most dialects of well standardised languages, widely used in everyday communication. Despite this fact, automatic processing of Swiss German is still a considerable challenge due to the fact that it is mostly a spoken variety rarely recorded and that it is subject to considerable regional variation. This paper presents a freely available general-purpose corpus of spoken Swiss German suitable for linguistic research, but also for training automatic tools. The corpus is a result of a long design process, intensive manual work and specially adapted computational processing. We first describe how the documents were transcribed, segmented and aligned with the sound source, and how inconsistent transcriptions were unified through an additional normalisation layer. We then present a bootstrapping approach to automatic normalisation using different machine-translation-inspired methods. Furthermore, we evaluate the performance of part-of-speech taggers on our data and show how the same bootstrapping approach improves part-of-speech tagging by 10% over four rounds. Finally, we present the modalities of access of the corpus as well as the data format.
Anthology ID:
L16-1641
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
4061–4066
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1641/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tanja Samardžić, Yves Scherrer, and Elvira Glaser. 2016. ArchiMob - A Corpus of Spoken Swiss German. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 4061–4066, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
ArchiMob - A Corpus of Spoken Swiss German (Samardžić et al., LREC 2016)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1641.pdf