Use of Transformer-Based Models for Word-Level Transliteration of the Book of the Dean of Lismore
Edward Gow-Smith, Mark McConville, William Gillies, Jade Scott, Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh
Abstract
The Book of the Dean of Lismore (BDL) is a 16th-century Scottish Gaelic manuscript written in a non-standard orthography. In this work, we outline the problem of transliterating the text of the BDL into a standardised orthography, and perform exploratory experiments using Transformer-based models for this task. In particular, we focus on the task of word-level transliteration, and achieve a character-level BLEU score of 54.15 with our best model, a BART architecture pre-trained on the text of Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia and then fine-tuned on around 2,000 word-level parallel examples. Our initial experiments give promising results, but we highlight the shortcomings of our model, and discuss directions for future work.- Anthology ID:
- 2022.cltw-1.13
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 4th Celtic Language Technology Workshop within LREC2022
- Month:
- June
- Year:
- 2022
- Address:
- Marseille, France
- Editors:
- Theodorus Fransen, William Lamb, Delyth Prys
- Venue:
- CLTW
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association
- Note:
- Pages:
- 94–98
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2022.cltw-1.13
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Edward Gow-Smith, Mark McConville, William Gillies, Jade Scott, and Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh. 2022. Use of Transformer-Based Models for Word-Level Transliteration of the Book of the Dean of Lismore. In Proceedings of the 4th Celtic Language Technology Workshop within LREC2022, pages 94–98, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
- Cite (Informal):
- Use of Transformer-Based Models for Word-Level Transliteration of the Book of the Dean of Lismore (Gow-Smith et al., CLTW 2022)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/proper-vol2-ingestion/2022.cltw-1.13.pdf