by Fernando Benites (ZHAW and SpinningBytes)

cross-posted from the SpinningBytes blog

schwiiz ja*

This year, the SpinningBytes team participated in the VarDial competition, where we achieved second place in the German Dialect Identification shared task. The task’s goal was to identify, which region the speaker of a given sentence is from, based on the dialect he or she speaks. Dialect identification is an important NLP task; for instance, it can be used for automatic processing in a speech-to-text context, where identifying dialects enables to load a specialized model. In this blog post, we do a step by step walkthrough how to create the model in Python, while comparing it to previous years’ approaches.