Larth: Dataset and Machine Translation for Etruscan

Gianluca Vico, Gerasimos Spanakis


Abstract
Etruscan is an ancient language spoken in Italy from the 7th century BC to the 1st century AD. There are no native speakers of the language at the present day, and its resources are scarce, as there are an estimated 12,000 known inscriptions. To the best of our knowledge, there are no publicly available Etruscan corpora for natural language processing. Therefore, we propose a dataset for machine translation from Etruscan to English, which contains 2891 translated examples from existing academic sources. Some examples are extracted manually, while others are acquired in an automatic way. Along with the dataset, we benchmark different machine translation models observing that it is possible to achieve a BLEU score of 10.1 with a small transformer model. Releasing the dataset can help enable future research on this language, similar languages or other languages with scarce resources.
Anthology ID:
2023.alp-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the Ancient Language Processing Workshop
Month:
September
Year:
2023
Address:
Varna, Bulgaria
Editors:
Adam Anderson, Shai Gordin, Bin Li, Yudong Liu, Marco C. Passarotti
Venues:
ALP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria
Note:
Pages:
39–48
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.alp-1.5
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Gianluca Vico and Gerasimos Spanakis. 2023. Larth: Dataset and Machine Translation for Etruscan. In Proceedings of the Ancient Language Processing Workshop, pages 39–48, Varna, Bulgaria. INCOMA Ltd., Shoumen, Bulgaria.
Cite (Informal):
Larth: Dataset and Machine Translation for Etruscan (Vico & Spanakis, ALP-WS 2023)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/improve-issue-templates/2023.alp-1.5.pdf