Influence of dialectal spelling variation on language processing

Supervisor: Jan Brasser

Dialectal variations with non-standardized spelling can pose difficulties for readers and language models. The variation in spelling convention often on an individual level could cause difficulties in readers of dialectal writing, as well as computational language models (understanding and generation).

In this project, the student will design and implement an experiment to investigate the processing of non-standardized written language in Swiss German (or similar language context, if it is feasible to do this in ZH) using eye tracking. The data can then be used to (can also be split into multiple different projects/theses): 

•     Investigate the effect of specific spelling variations on Eye Movements 
•     Use the eye movement data to develop a methodology to optimize spelling variants for easy processing 
•     Use the eye movement data to enhance the generation of dialectal text by language models 

Python, R (depending on analysis method), Eye-Tracking Course