Improving Dialectal Slot and Intent Detection with Auxiliary Tasks: A Multi-Dialectal Bavarian Case Study

Result code in IS VaVaI

<a href="https://www.isvavai.cz/riv?ss=detail&h=RIV%2F00216208%3A11320%2F26%3AUB3W5IJ5" target="_blank" >RIV/00216208:11320/26:UB3W5IJ5 - isvavai.cz</a>

Result on the web

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DOI - Digital Object Identifier

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Result language

angličtina

Original language name

Improving Dialectal Slot and Intent Detection with Auxiliary Tasks: A Multi-Dialectal Bavarian Case Study

Original language description

Reliable slot and intent detection (SID) is crucial in natural language understanding for applications like digital assistants. Encoder-only transformer models fine-tuned on high-resource languages generally perform well on SID. However, they struggle with dialectal data, where no standardized form exists and training data is scarce and costly to produce. We explore zero-shot transfer learning for SID, focusing on multiple Bavarian dialects, for which we release a new dataset for the Munich dialect. We evaluate models trained on auxiliary tasks in Bavarian, and compare joint multi-task learning with intermediate-task training. We also compare three types of auxiliary tasks: token-level syntactic tasks, named entity recognition (NER), and language modelling. We find that the included auxiliary tasks have a more positive effect on slot filling than intent classification (with NER having the most positive effect), and that intermediate-task training yields more consistent performance gains. Our best-performing approach improves intent classification performance on Bavarian dialects by 5.1 and slot filling F1 by 8.4 percentage points. © 2025 Association for Computational Linguistics.

Czech name

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Czech description

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Type

D - Article in proceedings

CEP classification

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OECD FORD branch

10201 - Computer sciences, information science, bioinformathics (hardware development to be 2.2, social aspect to be 5.8)

Project

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Continuities

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Publication year

2025

Confidentiality

S - Úplné a pravdivé údaje o projektu nepodléhají ochraně podle zvláštních právních předpisů

Article name in the collection

VarDial - Workshop NLP Similar Lang., Var. Dialects, Proc. Workshop

ISBN

979-8-89176-208-4

ISSN

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e-ISSN

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Number of pages

19

Pages from-to

128-146

Publisher name

Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL)

Place of publication

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Event location

Abu Dhabi

Event date

Jan 1, 2026

Type of event by nationality

WRD - Celosvětová akce

UT code for WoS article

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