Morphosyntactic Variation in Italian and Romansh Dialects: The Manzini & Savoia (2005) Corpus Within Project CHANGES

Abstract
This paper presents the digitization and online dissemination of the Manzini & Savoia (2005) corpus, one of the most comprehensive resources on morphosyntactic variation in Italian and Romansh dialects. Developed within Project CHANGES (Cultural Heritage Active Innovation for Sustainable Society), the initiative responds to the urgent need for systematic documentation and open-access preservation of linguistic diversity. The new platform integrates a relational PostgreSQL database, a Strapi-based backend, and an interactive web interface, offering multiple modes of exploration-including map-based navigation, morphosyntactic query, and access to original fieldwork notebooks. The entire dataset (64,472 examples with IPA transcription and metadata) is openly available on Zenodo for independent research and reuse. The project also explores experimental applications of Large Language Models (LLMs) for automatic annotation, demonstrating the potential for computational approaches in dialectology. This work provides a replicable model for sustainable digital archiving and fosters interdisciplinary research across linguistic, computational, and cultural heritage domains.
Description

CCS Concepts: Human-centered computing → Web-based interaction; Information systems → Relational database model; Applied computing → Language translation; Social and professional topics → Cultural characteristics

        
@inproceedings{
10.2312:dh.20253066
, booktitle = {
Digital Heritage
}, editor = {
Campana, Stefano
and
Ferdani, Daniele
and
Graf, Holger
and
Guidi, Gabriele
and
Hegarty, Zackary
and
Pescarin, Sofia
and
Remondino, Fabio
}, title = {{
Morphosyntactic Variation in Italian and Romansh Dialects: The Manzini & Savoia (2005) Corpus Within Project CHANGES
}}, author = {
Mazzaggio, Greta
and
Zoli, Carlo
and
Binazzi, Neri
and
Ludovico, Luca Andrea
and
Vena, Mael Vittorio
and
Manzini, M. Rita
and
Savoia, Leonardo Maria
}, year = {
2025
}, publisher = {
The Eurographics Association
}, ISBN = {
978-3-03868-277-6
}, DOI = {
10.2312/dh.20253066
} }
Citation