Standard German Subtitling of Swiss German TV content: the PASSAGE Project

Abstract

In Switzerland, two thirds of the population speak Swiss German, a primarily spoken language with no standardised written form. It is widely used on Swiss TV, for example in news reports, interviews or talk shows, and subtitles are required for people who cannot understand this spoken language. This paper focuses on the task of automatic Standard German subtitling of spoken Swiss German, and more specifically on the translation of a normalised Swiss German speech recognition result into Standard German suitable for subtitles. Our contribution consists of a comparison of different statistical and deep learning MT systems for this task and an aligned corpus of normalised Swiss German and Standard German subtitles. Results of two evaluations, automatic and human, show that the systems succeed in improving the content, but are currently not capable of producing entirely correct Standard German.

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