What Do Dialect Speakers Want? A Survey of Attitudes Towards Language
  Technology for German Dialects
Verena Blaschke Christoph Purschke Hinrich Schütze Barbara Plank
Natural language processing (NLP) has largely focused on modelling
standardized languages. More recently, attention has increasingly shifted to
local, non-standardized languages and dialects. However, the relevant speaker
populations' needs and wishes with respect to NLP tools are largely unknown. In
this paper, we focus on dialects and regional languages related to German -- a
group of varieties that is heterogeneous in terms of prestige and
standardization. We survey speakers of these varieties (N=327) and present
their opinions on hypothetical language technologies for their dialects.
Although attitudes vary among subgroups of our respondents, we find that
respondents are especially in favour of potential NLP tools that work with
dialectal input (especially audio input) such as virtual assistants, and less
so for applications that produce dialectal output such as machine translation
or spellcheckers.