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The Generator-Eraser Paradox: Community Guidelines for Responsible LLM-Assisted Dialect Resource Creation

Paper · 2026 · Wajdi Zaghouani

Summary

The paper examines a tension in using large language models to build dialect resources. LLMs can speed up the work by drafting lexicon entries from retrieved attestations, helping explore large collections, proposing metadata and suggesting candidate annotations for human review. But their statistical preference for frequent, prestige forms can also wear down what makes dialects distinctive. The author calls this the generator-eraser paradox and grounds it in variationist sociolinguistics, corpus linguistics (representativeness, provenance) and research on model collapse. From this framework, the paper derives 12 community guidelines, framed as design requirements with explicit checks, for creating and documenting dialect resources. Through an Arabic-focused case study that systematically compares commonly used resources, the paper demonstrates how the guidelines address diglossia, inconsistent spelling and community governance. The work is explicitly conceptual and reports no experiments or model metrics. Its value is a practical governance framework that lets communities adopt LLMs while protecting variation, authenticity and data sovereignty, and that can carry over to other diglossic or pluricentric languages.

Key points

  • The paper names four ways LLMs can erode dialects: prior-driven normalization, orthographic homogenization, synthetic recursion (unlabeled generated text entering corpora or training data; cf. Shumailov et al., 2024), and prestige drift, meaning the gradual replacement of dialect markers with high-variety equivalents.
  • It lists four beneficial uses: retrieval-grounded drafting (RAG), corpus navigation and clustering, metadata enrichment, and annotation workflow support with humans keeping final authority.
  • It proposes 12 community guidelines as implementable requirements. The detailed guideline text is in the middle part of the paper, which was not available in the provided extract.
  • The Arabic case study focuses on diglossia between MSA and regional dialects. Resources cited include the Arabic Online Commentary Dataset, MADAR, Gumar, NADI, QADI and the BOLT Egyptian Arabic treebank, along with CODA-style conventional orthography work.
  • The paper argues that dialect corpora built from social media often reflect who uses a platform rather than the dialect community itself. It recommends provenance documentation such as datasheets and data statements, whose adoption in dialect work remains uneven.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

🎓Northwestern University in QatarDoha · Qatar39 works · 148 citations

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 18,614 worksArtificial Intelligence · 17,965 worksArts and Humanities · 17,450 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 17,296 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Language models & pretraining · 3,894 works

Cite

Cite as Wajdi Zaghouani. 2026. The Generator-Eraser Paradox: Community Guidelines for Responsible LLM-Assisted Dialect Resource Creation. Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dialects in NLP –- A Resource Perspective.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.63317/3kcvyhsgnv3u

@inproceedings{zaghouani2026generator,
  title = {{The Generator-Eraser Paradox: Community Guidelines for Responsible LLM-Assisted Dialect Resource Creation}},
  author = {Wajdi Zaghouani},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dialects in NLP –- A Resource Perspective},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.63317/3kcvyhsgnv3u},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.63317/3kcvyhsgnv3u}
}

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