Continuous variation in computational morphology - the example of Swiss German

Most work in natural language processing is geared towards written, standardized language varieties. This focus is generally justified on practical grounds of data availability and socio-economical relevance, but does not always reflect the linguistic reality of sub-standard varieties. In this paper, we aim at the computational description of the morphology of a language with continuous internal variation, as it is encountered in most dialect landscapes. The work presented here is applied to Swiss German dialects; these dialects are well documented through dialectological research and are among the most lively ones in Europe in terms of social acceptance and media exposure.