AI language models show bias against regional German dialects

This is shown by a recent collaborative study between Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the universities of Hamburg and Washington. The results, presented at this year's Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP) - one of the world's leading conferences in computational linguistics - show that all tested AI systems reproduce social stereotypes. "Dialects are an essential part of cultural identity," emphasized Minh Duc Bui, a doctoral researcher in von der Wense's Natural Language Processing (NLP) group at JGU's Institute of Computer Science. "Our analyses suggest that language models associate dialects with negative traits - thereby perpetuating problematic social biases." Using linguistic databases containing orthographic and phonetic variants of German dialects, the team first translated seven regional varieties into Standard German.