This paper discusses how the transcription hurdle in dialect corpus building can be cleared. While corpus analysis has strongly gained in popularity in linguistic research, dialect corpora are still relatively scarce. This scarcity can be attributed to several factors, one of which is the challenging nature of transcribing dialects, given a lack of both orthographic norms for many dialects and speech technological tools trained on dialect data. This paper addresses the questions (i) how dialects can be transcribed efficiently and (ii) whether speech technological tools can lighten the transcription work. These questions are tackled using the Southern Dutch dialects (SDDs) as case study, for which the usefulness of automatic speech recognition (ASR), respeaking, and forced alignment is considered. Tests with these tools indicate that dialects still constitute a major speech technological challenge. In the case of the SDDs, the decision was made to use speech technology only for the word-level segmentation of the audio files, as the transcription itself could not be sped up by ASR tools. The discussion does however indicate that the usefulness of ASR and other related tools for a dialect corpus project is strongly determined by the sound quality of the dialect recordings, the availability of statistical dialect-specific models, the degree of linguistic differentiation between the dialects and the standard language, and the goals the transcripts have to serve.

Major changes in municipal solid waste (MSW)-related services, such as the collection system, often require important initial investments, while the benefits on the output side typically occur over a longer time perspective. However, when analyzing the association between such policy choices and cost efficiency of MSW collection and disposal, the time horizon is often not taken into account. This article advocates the use of the Malmquist Productivity Index approach to measure and analyze cost efficiency changes over time after the introduction of the relative new weight-based waste collection and billing system in Flanders. The results and robustness checks indicate that introducing weight-based pricing does not lead to lower cost efficiency of MSW service provision.