Finnish Dialect Identification: The Effect of Audio and Text

Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 8777–8783 November 7–11, 2021. c⃝2021 Association for Computational Linguistics 8777 Finnish Dialect Identification: The Effect of Audio and Text Mika Hämäläinen, Khalid Alnajjar, Niko Partanen and Jack Rueter Department of Digital Humanities University of Helsinki & Rootroo Ltd firstname.lastname@helsinki.fi Abstract Finnish is a language with multiple dialects that not only differ from each other in terms of accent (pronunciation) but also in terms of morphological forms and lexical choice. We present the first approach to automatically de- tect the dialect of a speaker based on a dialect transcript and transcript with audio recording in a dataset consisting of 23 different dialects. Our results show that the best accuracy is re- ceived by combining both of the modalities, as text only reaches to an overall accuracy of 57%, where as text and audio reach to 85%. Our code, models and data have been released openly on Github and Zenodo. 1 Introduction We present an approach for identifying the dialect of a speaker automatically solely based on text and on audio and text together. We compare the uni- modal approach to the bimodal one. There are no previous dialect identification approaches for Finnish. There are several situations were a dialect identification method can be of use. For example, if we have ASR models fine tuned for specific di- alects, the dialect identification from audio could be used as a preprocessing step. The model could also be used to label recorded materials automatically in order to create archival metadata. In order to make our contribution useful for others, we have released our code, models and processed data openly on GitHub1 and Zenodo2. Finnish is a large Uralic language that is one of the official languages of Finland, and is used essen- tially at all levels of the modern society. There are approximately five million Finnish speakers. The language belongs to the Finnic branch of the Uralic language family, and is very closely related to Kare- lian, Meänkieli and Kveeni, and is also closely re- lated to the Estonian language. It is more distantly 1https://github.com/Rootroo-ltd/ FinnishDialectIdentification 2https://zenodo.org/record/5330673 related to numerous Uralic languages spoken in Russia. The history of written Finnish starts in the 16th century. Current orthography is connected to this written tradition, which developed into the current form in the late 19th century with a conscious plan- ning and systematic development of the lexicon. After this, the changes have been minor (Häkkinen, 1994, 16), and also impacted lexicon, especially what it comes to the development of the vocabu- lary of the modern society and traditional agrarian terminology becoming less known. The Finnish spoken language, however, is still largely based on Finnish dialects. In the 20th cen- tury some of the strongest dialectal features have been disappearing, but there are still clearly dis- tinguishable spoken vernacular varieties that are regionally marked. It has been shown that instead of clear disappearance of dialects there are vari- ous features that are spreading, but …

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