Linguistic traits as heritable units? Spatial Bayesian clustering reveals Swiss German dialect regions

Syllables as Linguistic Units?

While there continues to be a debate in linguistics and speech processing as to the nature of an atomic unit, in computational approaches the atomic unit is universally taken to be the orthographic, space-demarcated “word”. We argue that for many richly inflected languages such as Indo-European languages, syllablebased approaches together with semantic grounding may provide certain advantages. ...

Abg 401 Heritable and Non-heritable Traits

Voice Äpp: a mobile app for crowdsourcing Swiss German dialect data

Crowdsourcing speech data through mobile applications is relatively new. In the present contribution we add to the existing body of research an innovative Android and iOS application called ‘Voice Äpp’. The free app is pioneering in the sense that it leverages its function as a medium for science communication – thus attracting an extensive user base – to crowdsource audio and dialect data. The...

Automatic speech recognition and translation of a Swiss German dialect: Walliserdeutsch

Walliserdeutsch is a Swiss German dialect spoken in the south west of Switzerland. To investigate the potential of automatic speech processing of Walliserdeutsch, a small database was collected based mainly on broadcast news from a local radio station. Experiments suggest that automatic speech recognition is feasible: use of another (Swiss German) database shows that the small data size lends i...

Compilation of a Swiss German Dialect Corpus and its Application to PoS Tagging

Swiss German is a dialect continuum whose dialects are very different from Standard German, the official language of the German part of Switzerland. However, dealing with Swiss German in natural language processing, usually the detour through Standard German is taken. As writing in Swiss German has become more and more popular in recent years, we would like to provide data to serve as a steppin...