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arXiv · 2205.11370

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
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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.

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Edward Gow-Smith, Mark McConville, William Gillies, Jade Scott, Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh. 2022-05-23. Use of Transformer-Based Models for Word-Level Transliteration of the Book of the Dean of Lismore. https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.11370

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