NorDial: A Preliminary Corpus of Written Norwegian Dialect Use

TL;DR

This paper introduces NorDial, a new annotated corpus of written Norwegian dialects from social media, enabling future linguistic research and model development for dialectal variation analysis.

Contribution

It presents the creation and annotation of the first small corpus of Norwegian dialectal tweets, along with initial experiments using state-of-the-art models.

Findings

Annotated a small corpus of Norwegian tweets for dialectal variation.

Performed preliminary classification experiments with current models.

Provided resources for future dialectal language research.

Abstract

Norway has a large amount of dialectal variation, as well as a general tolerance to its use in the public sphere. There are, however, few available resources to study this variation and its change over time and in more informal areas, \eg on social media. In this paper, we propose a first step to creating a corpus of dialectal variation of written Norwegian. We collect a small corpus of tweets and manually annotate them as Bokm{\aa}l, Nynorsk, any dialect, or a mix. We further perform preliminary experiments with state-of-the-art models, as well as an analysis of the data to expand this corpus in the future. Finally, we make the annotations and models available for future work.