Use of Transformer-Based Models for Word-Level Transliteration of the Book of the Dean of Lismore

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 fo...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inarXiv.org
Main Authors Gow-Smith, Edward, McConville, Mark, Gillies, William, Scott, Jade, Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh
Format Paper
LanguageEnglish
Published Ithaca Cornell University Library, arXiv.org 31.05.2022
Subjects
Orthography
Scottish Gaelic
Transformers
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Summary: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.
ISSN:2331-8422