NorDial: A Preliminary Corpus of Written Norwegian Dialect Use
This work addresses a gap in linguistic resources for analyzing dialect use in informal contexts like social media, but it is incremental as a preliminary step.
The researchers tackled the lack of resources for studying written Norwegian dialect variation by creating NorDial, a small corpus of tweets manually annotated for dialect categories, and performed preliminary experiments with state-of-the-art models.
Norway has a large amount of dialectal variation, as well as a general tolerance to its use in the public sphere. There are, however, few available resources to study this variation and its change over time and in more informal areas, \eg on social media. In this paper, we propose a first step to creating a corpus of dialectal variation of written Norwegian. We collect a small corpus of tweets and manually annotate them as Bokmål, Nynorsk, any dialect, or a mix. We further perform preliminary experiments with state-of-the-art models, as well as an analysis of the data to expand this corpus in the future. Finally, we make the annotations and models available for future work.