You have full access to this open access article. Swiss dialects of German are, unlike many dialects of other standardised languages, widely used in everyday communication. Despite this fact, automatic processing of Swiss German is still a considerable challenge due to the fact that it is mostly a spoken variety and that it is subject to considerable regional variation. This paper presents the ArchiMob corpus, a freely available general-purpose corpus of spoken Swiss German based on oral history interviews.
The corpus is a result of a long design process, intensive manual work and specially adapted computational processing. We first present the modalities of access of the corpus for linguistic, historic and computational research. We then describe how the documents were transcribed, segmented and aligned with the sound source. This work involved a series of experiments that have led to automatically annotated normalisation and part-of-speech tagging layers. Finally, we present several case studies to motivate the use of the corpus for digital humanities in general and for dialectology in particular.
Swiss society is characterised by highly complex linguistic practices in comparison with other European countries. Unlike in other European countries, where dialect usage decreases in favour of standardised variants in most social domains, Swiss dialects are widely used in various domains, including education and public speech. This is especially true in the case of German dialects, which are the topic of this article. Traditionally, the domains of use between standard German and Swiss German dialects have been divided according to the concept of medial diglossia Kolde ; Siebenhaar and Wyler , where standard German is used in written communication and some institutionalised settings of oral communication and the various dialects, fairly different from standard German, in spoken communication.
Following this traditional division, Swiss German varieties are rarely studied outside of the narrowly focused research area of dialectology. With the development of computer-mediated communication, the traditional division between the two domains has become less clear, as Swiss varieties are increasingly written and recorded Siebenhaar These developments call for and, at the same time, allow automatic processing of Swiss German for various purposes, including both research in digital humanities and developing practical applications.
In contrast to the increasing demand, basic tools for natural language processing of Swiss German texts are relatively undeveloped. Adapting existing tools developed for standard German has not proved successful. This paper presents an annotated corpus of spoken Swiss German, the ArchiMob corpus.
