# MaiBaam: A Multi-Dialectal Bavarian Universal Dependency Treebank

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.10293 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10293/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 Mar 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised Cross-lingual Representation Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.02116/) (2019)
- [Stanza: A Python Natural Language Processing Toolkit for Many Human Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.07082/) (2020)
- [German's Next Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10906/) (2020)
- [Massive Choice, Ample Tasks (MaChAmp): A Toolkit for Multi-task Learning in NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14672/) (2020)
- [From Masked Language Modeling to Translation: Non-English Auxiliary Tasks Improve Zero-shot Spoken Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07316/) (2021)
- [Improving Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfer between Closely Related Languages by injecting Character-level Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06772/) (2021)
- [Does Manipulating Tokenization Aid Cross-Lingual Transfer? A Study on POS Tagging for Non-Standardized Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10158/) (2023)
- [A Survey of Corpora for Germanic Low-Resource Languages and Dialects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.09805/) (2023)
- [How Universal is Genre in Universal Dependencies?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04971/) (2021)
- [Are UD Treebanks Getting More Consistent? A Report Card for English UD](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00636/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [LuxBank: The First Universal Dependency Treebank for Luxembourgish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04813/) (2024)
- [Sebastian, Basti, Wastl?! Recognizing Named Entities in Bavarian Dialectal Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12749/) (2024)
- [A Multi-Dialectal Dataset for German Dialect ASR and Dialect-to-Standard Speech Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.02894/) (2025)
- [Llama-GENBA-10B: A Trilingual Large Language Model for German, English and Bavarian](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05668/) (2025)
- [Indirect Question Answering in English, German and Bavarian: A Challenging Task for High- and Low-Resource Languages Alike](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15130/) (2026)
- [textitVersteasch du mi? Computational and Socio-Linguistic Perspectives on GenAI, LLMs, and Non-Standard Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28213/) (2026)
- [Saar-Voice: A Multi-Speaker Saarbr"ucken Dialect Speech Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11803/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite the success of the Universal Dependencies (UD) project exemplified by its impressive language breadth, there is still a lack in `within-language breadth': most treebanks focus on standard languages. Even for German, the language with the most annotations in UD, so far no treebank exists for one of its language varieties spoken by over 10M people: Bavarian. To contribute to closing this gap, we present the first multi-dialect Bavarian treebank (MaiBaam) manually annotated with part-of-speech and syntactic dependency information in UD, covering multiple text genres (wiki, fiction, grammar examples, social, non-fiction). We highlight the morphosyntactic differences between the closely-related Bavarian and German and showcase the rich variability of speakers' orthographies. Our corpus includes 15k tokens, covering dialects from all Bavarian-speaking areas spanning three countries. We provide baseline parsing and POS tagging results, which are lower than results obtained on German and vary substantially between different graph-based parsers. To support further research on Bavarian syntax, we make our dataset, language-specific guidelines and code publicly available.