Abstract
In computer-mediated communication, Latin-based scripts users often omit diacritics when writing. Such text is typically easily understandable to humans but very difficult for computational processing because many words become ambiguous or unknown. Letter-level approaches to diacritic restoration generalise better and do not require a lot of training data but word-level approaches tend to yield better results. However, they typically rely on a lexicon which is an expensive resource, not covering non-standard forms, and often not available for less-resourced languages. In this paper we present diacritic restoration models that are trained on easy-to-acquire corpora. We test three different types of corpora (Wikipedia, general web, Twitter) for three South Slavic languages (Croatian, Serbian and Slovene) and evaluate them on two types of text: standard (Wikipedia) and non-standard (Twitter). The proposed approach considerably outperforms charlifter, so far the only open source tool available for this task. We make the best performing systems freely available.- Anthology ID:
- L16-1573
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2016
- Address:
- Portorož, Slovenia
- Venue:
- LREC
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
- Note:
- Pages:
- 3612–3616
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/L16-1573
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Nikola Ljubešić, Tomaž Erjavec, and Darja Fišer. 2016. Corpus-Based Diacritic Restoration for South Slavic Languages. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 3612–3616, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
- Cite (Informal):
- Corpus-Based Diacritic Restoration for South Slavic Languages (Ljubešić et al., LREC 2016)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/paclic-22-ingestion/L16-1573.pdf