Dialect Section — Pilot Note
Status: UNVALIDATED PILOT. This is the current, honest state of the dialect pillar.
Summary
This section contains 30 items (dialect_items.json, ids D001–D030) testing whether the model can read Swiss German and recover Swiss institutional facts from it.
The Swiss German has been checked. The translations around it have not.
What has been verified, and how
This is the strongest part of the section, and it is stronger because of a decision made during planning.
The obvious approach — writing Swiss German sentences by hand — was rejected. The project author is not a native Swiss German speaker, and Phase 1B had already established that the risk of mis-attributing dialect features to the wrong region is real enough to corrupt a benchmark. Hand-written dialect would have made the entire pillar untrustworthy, and its weakness would have been invisible in the results: a low score could have meant the model is bad at Swiss German or the questions were badly written, and those cannot be told apart after the fact.
Instead, every Swiss German sentence was copied verbatim from the Alemannic Wikipedia (als.wikipedia.org, CC BY-SA 4.0) — a free encyclopedia written by native speakers, covering Zürich, Bern, Basel, Aargau and Walser German.
| Corpus files | 45 (source ids S101–S145) |
| Verbatim Swiss German sentences | 470 |
| Items built | 30 |
| Items whose text is machine-matched character-for-character against its source file | 30 / 30 |
That last row is enforced by scripts/verify_dialect.py, which fails the build on any mismatch. It has already earned its keep — see "Defects caught" below.
What has not been verified
Everything authored rather than quoted:
- The 12 Standard German reference translations (used for scoring the translation items).
- The multiple-choice distractors on the 18 deterministic items.
- The dialect region labels on 29 of 30 items (
DIALECT_EVIDENCEheaders record what supports each one; one item is honestly labelleduncertain). - The difficulty ratings.
Every item carries validated_by: null. scripts/verify_dialect.py treats any non-null value as a build error until a real validation log exists.
Why this is still worth submitting
- The input side is sound. Native-written text with a stable, citable URL. A reviewer can spot-check any item in two clicks.
- Three of four item types are fully deterministic — no LLM judge, so no judge variance, no judge circularity.
- The limitation is stated, not hidden, and the fix is a 20-minute volunteer task with a ready-made answer sheet.
- Partial validation is still validation. If a reviewer checks 10 of 30 items, that is reported as 10 of 30 — not quietly generalised to all 30.
What must happen before this is described as validated
- Send
data/dialect/VALIDATION_PACKET_FILLED.mdto a Swiss German speaker. - Apply their corrections to
dialect_items.json. - Set
validated_byper item. - Record the exchange in
dialect_validation_log.md(template below). - Re-run
python scripts/verify_dialect.py— it will still rejectvalidated_byuntil the log exists, so that step is deliberate: the log is the evidence, and the verifier should not take the word of a data field.
Defects caught during construction
Worth recording, because each one is a way this section could have been quietly wrong:
| Defect | How it was caught | Consequence |
|---|---|---|
SOURCE_ID stamped on all 14 files of each of 3 harvests — 14 duplicates per id |
provenance lookup silently collapsed 14 files into 1 | 45 files renumbered S101–S145 |
One item's Swiss German (D006) appeared nowhere in the corpus — fragments Narrazomft, oatsasässege matched zero files |
character-for-character provenance check | traced to a duplicated article harvested twice (S106/S136); item repointed by content, not by URL |
46 double-encoded UTF-8 sequences (zürich) in one item file |
dialect-label schema check | repaired; scripts/repair_mojibake.py |
| 13 items stored the corpus's quote delimiters inside the field value | provenance check | repaired; scripts/strip_corpus_quotes.py |
2 articles harvested twice (Fasnacht, Schweiz) |
duplicate-URL report | item provenance now resolved by content match |
The authoring pass had self-reported "0 mismatches" and "byte-verified" on the file with the mojibake and the fabricated item. A self-check that reads the data back through the same pipeline that produced it will agree with itself. The mechanical checks read raw bytes against an independent corpus, and that is the only reason these were found.
Limitations to state in the datasheet
- No native validation. Stated above; the central limitation.
- Encyclopaedic register. The corpus is Wikipedia prose — grammatically clean, somewhat formal, and not natural speech. A model could score well here and fail on conversational Swiss German. This is a coverage gap, not a solved problem.
- Written, not spoken. Swiss German is overwhelmingly spoken with little written tradition. We test written comprehension.
- Orthography confound. Swiss German has no standardised orthography. The corpus uses a house system close to Dieth (1938), but individual files sit in different registers. A model may be reading a transcription convention rather than failing the dialect. Every item records its
orthographyanddialect_evidence. - Dialect coverage is the Alemannic Wikipedia's, not Switzerland's. Zürich is well represented (370 articles available), Bern moderately (108), Aargau not at all (the category is empty — no padding was done). "Swiss German" here means "what Alemannic Wikipedia contains".
- 13 of 30 items are Basel German. Basel is the corpus's largest dialect. Results are always reported per dialect and never pooled.
- Content-keyword coverage cannot distinguish comprehension from pattern recovery. It is used only for the 12 translation items; the other 18 items carry the comprehension signal deterministically.
- Three assumptions were refuted during harvesting and must not reappear:
-tfinal devoicing does not distinguish Basel from Zürich (the devoiced copulaischtis Walser/Valais);ChuchvsKuchidoes not exist in this corpus (Basel saysBroot/Laib);MäritvsMarktis unverified.scripts/verify_dialect.pyrejects items relying on any of them.
dialect_validation_log.md — template
Create this file when validation arrives.
# Dialect Validation Log
## Validator
- Name / handle:
- Dialect region(s):
- Date:
- Time spent:
- Items reviewed: N of 30
- Items confirmed unchanged: N
- Items corrected: N
## Per-item corrections
| item | field | original | corrected | reason |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| D0xx | standard_german_reference | ... | ... | ... |
## Items not reviewed
(list)
## Validator's general notes
(anything about the Swiss German itself, the dialect labels, or the
difficulty of the items - these are valuable even when the item is fine)
Related limitation elsewhere in the project
The same validation gap affects Phase 1B: 37 of 53 non-English renderings in values_multilingual_pairs.json are labelled author_written_unvalidated. A single volunteer with Swiss German can close both gaps — and the Discord call covers both.