Abstract
Yiddish is a low-resource language belonging to the Germanic language family and written using the Hebrew alphabet. As a language, Yiddish can be considered resource-poor as it lacks both public accessible corpora and a widely-used standard orthography, with various countries and organizations influencing the spellings speakers use. While existing corpora of Yiddish text do exist, they are often only written in a single, potentially non-standard orthography, with no parallel version with standard orthography available. In this work, we introduce the first multi-orthography parallel corpus of Yiddish nouns built by scraping word entries from Wiktionary. We also demonstrate how the corpus can be used to bootstrap a transliteration model using the Sequitur-G2P grapheme-to-phoneme conversion toolkit to map between various orthographies. Our trained system achieves error rates between 16.79% and 28.47% on the test set, depending on the orthographies considered. In addition to quantitative analysis, we also conduct qualitative error analysis of the trained system, concluding that non-phonetically spelled Hebrew words are the largest cause of error. We conclude with remarks regarding future work and release the corpus and associated code under a permissive license for the larger community to use.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.lrec-1.119
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Marseille, France
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association
- Note:
- Pages:
- 948–952
- Language:
- English
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.119
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Jonne Saleva. 2020. A Multi-Orthography Parallel Corpus of Yiddish Nouns. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 948–952, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Multi-Orthography Parallel Corpus of Yiddish Nouns (Saleva, LREC 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nodalida-main-page/2020.lrec-1.119.pdf