FIT team helps build a unique dialect map

A team from the Faculty of Information Technology at the BUT, led by Martin Karafiát, is involved in a unique dialect mapping project. In cooperation with the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and Palacký University in Olomouc, they are creating a website where you can select a region of the Czech Republic and listen to the dialects characteristic of a given place. In addition, the project team is categorising the recordings, which go back to the 1950s, according to various criteria, such as the themes of the narratives.


Researchers from the Dialectology Department of the Institute of Czech Language of the Czech Academy of Sciences have long been trying to map and preserve the various dialects across the Czech Republic. In 2023, they have enlisted the help of experts from the Speech@FIT group, who are currently working on creating a system that would be able to identify the dialect. And also create an automatic transcription of the recordings. "Our speech group has had great success in the areas of language identification, speaker identification and speech transcription. So the primary idea is to bring these areas together, work with unique data and create a system that will be able to automatically transcribe the audio data, which will be a huge help to researchers at the Academy of Sciences. Especially because the data is specific and the classic transcribers from Google or Microsoft fail," explains Martin Karafiát from FIT BUT.


You can read more about this project in our article here.