--- title: "OcWikiDialects — Nédey 2026" description: "Occitan is a dialect continuum of southern France and nearby areas of Spain and Italy." authors: ["Oriane Nédey", "Rachel Bawden", "Thibault Clérice", "Benoît Sagot"] year: 2026 venue: "Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects" source: "https://aclanthology.org/2026.vardial-1.4/" doi: "10.18653/v1/2026.vardial-1.4" licence: "CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/nedey-2026-ocwikidialects-wikipedia-dataset-rich-metadata/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/papers/nedey-2026-ocwikidialects-wikipedia-dataset-rich-metadata/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/) / [2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2026/page/4/) / OcWikiDialects: A Wikipedia Dataset With Rich Metadata for Occitan Dialect Identification # OcWikiDialects: A Wikipedia Dataset With Rich Metadata for Occitan Dialect Identification **Authors:** Oriane Nédey, [Rachel Bawden](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/rachel-bawden/), Thibault Clérice, [Benoît Sagot](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/authors/benoit-sagot/) · **Year:** 2026 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0 (ACL Anthology)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2026.vardial-1.4/) · [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2026.vardial-1.4.pdf) · [DOI 10.18653/v1/2026.vardial-1.4](https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.vardial-1.4) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W7140123162) **Citations:** 0 citations (openalex-snapshot · 2026-10-14) · 1 in our library, of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read ## Summary Occitan is a dialect continuum of southern France and nearby areas of Spain and Italy. Most NLP tools and standards such as ISO 639 treat it as a single language, and no public system existed for telling its varieties apart. The main obstacle is the lack of dialect-annotated text. The authors address this with OcWikiDialects, a corpus built from Occitan Wikipedia. Clean text comes from FineWiki, and the full-history XML dump supplies dialect tags, revision histories and contributor information, including self-declared proficiency, declared dialect and bot status. The text is split into paragraphs and sentences. Combining this corpus with earlier dialect-labelled resources, the team trained n-gram SVM, FastText and fine-tuned BERT classifiers to distinguish up to eight varieties. They evaluated them on both in-domain and out-of-domain test sets. The fine-tuned oc-mBERT performed best. An ablation shows that adding the Wikipedia data clearly helps, above all for rare dialects. Accuracy still varies widely across varieties, so less-documented Occitan dialects need more resources. ## Key points - **Size:** OcWikiDialects contains 7,292 dialect-tagged articles, about 57k paragraphs, 290k sentences and 4M tokens. - **Labels:** There are ten dialect labels. Provençal and Languedocian each cover roughly 2k articles, and Provençal alone exceeds 2M tokens. Auvergnat and Vivaroalpine are scarce but still better covered than in other datasets. - **Contributors:** Only 35 of 1,249 active editors stated a dialect on their user page. - **Best result:** Without text preprocessing, oc-mBERT reached a top macro F1 of 58.15 on the combined (CONCAT) test set. - **Ablation and errors:** Removing the Wikipedia training data lowers macro F1 by as much as 23.48 points for oc-mBERT. Without it, the model never predicts Aranese, Auvergnat or Vivaroalpine. Rare classes suffer from low recall, while Languedocian tends to be over-predicted. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* Fields: [Linguistics & languages](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/shelves/linguistics/) ## Cite The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{nedey2026ocwikidialects, title = {{OcWikiDialects: A Wikipedia Dataset With Rich Metadata for Occitan Dialect Identification}}, author = {Nédey, Oriane and Bawden, Rachel and Clérice, Thibault and Sagot, Benoît}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects}, year = {2026}, doi = {10.18653/v1/2026.vardial-1.4}, url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.vardial-1.4} } ``` - [← previous OasisSimp: An Open-source Asian-English Sentence Simplification Dataset](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/liu-2026-oasissimp-open-source-asian-english/) - [next → Old English (Wikibooks, fetched 2026-10-17)](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/contributors-2026-old-english/) - [↑ back to papers of 2026](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/papers/2026/page/4/) ## References 1 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Noëmi Aepli, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Adrian-Gabriel Chifu, William Domingues, Fahim Faisal, Mihaela Gaman, Radu Tudor Ionescu, and Yves Scherrer. 2022. Findings of the VarDial evaluation campaign 2022. In Proceedings of the Ninth Workshop on NLP for Similar Languages, Varieties and Dialects, pages… [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=No%C3%ABmi+Aepli%2C+Antonios+Anastasopoulos%2C+Adrian%2DGabriel+Chifu%2C+William+Domingues%2C+Fahim+Faisal%2C+Mihaela+Gaman%2C+Radu+Tudor+Ionescu%2C+and+Yves+Scherrer%2E+2022%2E+Findings+of+the+VarDial+evaluation+campaign+202)