SynthDiaSG – Synthetic Dialectology of Swiss German

The goal of this project is to establish Synthetic Dialectology, a new interdisciplinary field studying the perception and variation of synthetic speech. It brings together dialectology and speech processing: synthetic voices enable controlled experiments on dialect features, while speech technology benefits from evaluation methods grounded in human dialect perception.

The project pursues two main goals. On the technical side, it develops TTS models that can generate convincing dialect-specific and locally varying speech, along with appropriate evaluation methods. On the dialectological side, it investigates how Swiss German speakers perceive dialect boundaries and authenticity of synthetic dialect audios.

The research is structured into four work packages: (1) the creation of a corpus of spoken Swiss German designed to capture geolinguistic variation across regions; (2) large-scale human evaluation protocols with speakers and linguists to assess dialect attribution and feature perception at a coarse-grained level; (3) development of TTS models that represent dialect continua using geographically informed latent representations; and (4) the use of synthetic voices as experimental tools to study dialect perception in relation to linguistic, geographic, and social factors.

The project is innovative in combining perceptual studies, linguistically grounded methods, and automated evaluation. It extends state-of-the-art TTS systems to model dialect continua rather than discrete categories and provides a new empirical foundation for the study of Swiss German dialect perception and authenticity.

SynthDiaSG (2026–2029) is an interdisciplinary project hosted by the Centre for Artificial Intelligence, School of Engineering ZHAW and the Zurich Center for Linguistics, University of Zurich and funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant number 10007532).

Co-PIs

Prof. Dr. Mark Cieliebak (Computer Science)
Prof. Dr. Anja Hasse (Linguistics)

Postdocs

Dr. Jan Milan Deriu (Computer Science)
Dr. Patrick Mächler (Linguistics)

PhD Student

N.A.

Student Assistant

BA Julia Weller