Still All Greeklish to Me: Greeklish to Greek Transliteration
Anastasios Toumazatos, John Pavlopoulos, Ion Androutsopoulos, Stavros Vassos
Abstract
Modern Greek is normally written in the Greek alphabet. In informal online messages, however, Greek is often written using characters available on Latin-character keyboards, a form known as Greeklish. Originally used to bypass the lack of support for the Greek alphabet in older computers, Greeklish is now also used to avoid switching languages on multilingual keyboards, hide spelling mistakes, or as a form of slang. There is no consensus mapping, hence the same Greek word can be written in numerous different ways in Greeklish. Even native Greek speakers may struggle to understand (or be annoyed by) Greeklish, which requires paying careful attention to context to decipher. Greeklish may also be a problem for NLP models trained on Greek datasets written in the Greek alphabet. Experimenting with a range of statistical and deep learning models on both artificial and real-life Greeklish data, we find that: (i) prompting large language models (e.g., GPT-4) performs impressively well with few- or even zero-shot training, outperforming several fine-tuned encoder-decoder models; however (ii) a twenty years old statistical Greeklish transliteration model is still very competitive; and (iii) the problem is still far from having been solved; (iv) nevertheless, downstream Greek NLP systems that need to cope with Greeklish, such as moderation classifiers, can benefit significantly even with the current non-perfect transliteration systems. We make all our code, models, and data available and suggest future improvements, based on an analysis of our experimental results.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.1330
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 15309–15319
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.1330
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Anastasios Toumazatos, John Pavlopoulos, Ion Androutsopoulos, and Stavros Vassos. 2024. Still All Greeklish to Me: Greeklish to Greek Transliteration. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 15309–15319, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- Still All Greeklish to Me: Greeklish to Greek Transliteration (Toumazatos et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.1330.pdf