Parnian Fazel


2025

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ParsiPy: NLP Toolkit for Historical Persian Texts in Python
Farhan Farsi | Parnian Fazel | Sepand Haghighi | Sadra Sabouri | Farzaneh Goshtasb | Nadia Hajipour | Ehsaneddin Asgari | Hossein Sameti
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Ancient Language Processing

The study of historical languages presents unique challenges due to their complex ortho-graphic systems, fragmentary textual evidence, and the absence of standardized digital repre-sentations of text in those languages. Tack-ling these challenges needs special NLP digi-tal tools to handle phonetic transcriptions and analyze ancient texts. This work introduces ParsiPy1, an NLP toolkit designed to facili-tate the analysis of historical Persian languages by offering modules for tokenization, lemma-tization, part-of-speech tagging, phoneme-to-transliteration conversion, and word embed-ding. We demonstrate the utility of our toolkit through the processing of Parsig (Middle Per-sian) texts, highlighting its potential for ex-panding computational methods in the study of historical languages. Through this work, we contribute to the field of computational philol-ogy, offering tools that can be adapted for the broader study of ancient texts and their digital preservation.

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PahGen: Generating Ancient Pahlavi Text via Grammar-guided Zero-shot Translation
Farhan Farsi | Parnian Fazel | Farzaneh Goshtasb | Nadia Hajipour | Sadra Sabouri | Ehsaneddin Asgari | Hossein Sameti
Proceedings of the Eighth Workshop on Technologies for Machine Translation of Low-Resource Languages (LoResMT 2025)

The Pahlavi language, aka Middle Persian, is a critical part of Persian cultural and historical heritage which bridges the Old Persian and Modern Persian (Farsi). However, due to its limited digital presence and the scarcity of comprehensive linguistic resources, Pahlavi is at risk of extinction. As an early attempt to preserve this language, this study introduces a framework to translate English text into Pahlavi. Our approach combines grammar-guided term extraction with zero-shot translation, leveraging large language models (LLMs) to generate syntactically and semantically accurate Pahlavi sentences.This framework aims to preserve the Pahlavi language and serves as a model for reviving other endangered languages with similar characteristics. Finally using our framework, we generate a novel dataset of 360 expert-validated parallel English-Pahlavi texts.