# Dialectal Speech Recognition and Translation of Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text: Microsoft's Submission to SwissText 2021

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.08126 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.08126/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 8 of its 23 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Jun 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Enriching Word Vectors with Subword Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.04606/) (2016)
- [Deep Speech: Scaling up end-to-end speech recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.5567/) (2014)
- [Jasper: An End-to-End Convolutional Neural Acoustic Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.03288/) (2019)
- [Achieving Human Parity in Conversational Speech Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1610.05256/) (2016)
- [Swiss Parliaments Corpus, an Automatically Aligned Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02810/) (2020)
- [Arabic Speech Recognition by End-to-End, Modular Systems and Human](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.08454/) (2021)
- [A Swiss German Dictionary: Variation in Speech and Writing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.00139/) (2020)
- [Acoustic data-driven lexicon learning based on a greedy pronunciation selection framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03747/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [STT4SG-350: A Speech Corpus for All Swiss German Dialect Regions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18855/) (2023)
- [2nd Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text Shared Task at SwissText 2022](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06790/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking NLP-supported Language Sample Analysis for Swiss Children's Speech](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00780/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper describes the winning approach in the Shared Task 3 at SwissText 2021 on Swiss German Speech to Standard German Text, a public competition on dialect recognition and translation. Swiss German refers to the multitude of Alemannic dialects spoken in the German-speaking parts of Switzerland. Swiss German differs significantly from standard German in pronunciation, word inventory and grammar. It is mostly incomprehensible to native German speakers. Moreover, it lacks a standardized written script. To solve the challenging task, we propose a hybrid automatic speech recognition system with a lexicon that incorporates translations, a 1st pass language model that deals with Swiss German particularities, a transfer-learned acoustic model and a strong neural language model for 2nd pass rescoring. Our submission reaches 46.04% BLEU on a blind conversational test set and outperforms the second best competitor by a 12% relative margin.