Data acquisition in dialectology is typically a tedious task, as dialect samples of spoken language have to be collected via questionnaires or interviews. In this article, we suggest to use the “web as a corpus” approach for dialectology. We present a case study that demonstrates how authentic language data for the Bavarian dialect (ISO 639-3:bar) can be collected automatically from the social network Facebook. We also show that Facebook can be used effectively as a crowdsourcing platform, where users are willing to translate dialect words collaboratively in order to create a common lexicon of their Bavarian dialect. Key insights from the case study are summarized as “lessons learned”, together with suggestions for future enhancements of the lexicon creation approach.
@InProceedings{BURGHARDT16.820,
author = {Manuel Burghardt and Daniel Granvogl and Christian Wolff}, title = {Creating a Lexicon of Bavarian Dialect by Means of Facebook Language Data and Crowdsourcing}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)}, year = {2016}, month = {may}, date = {23-28}, location = {Portorož, Slovenia}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Marko Grobelnik and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Helene Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-9-1}, language = {english} }
Summary of the paper