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Dominic P. Fischer

Publications and source records attributed to Dominic P. Fischer.

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RUMLEM: A Dictionary-Based Lemmatizer for Romansh

Lemmatization -- the task of mapping an inflected word form to its dictionary form -- is a crucial component of many NLP applications. In this paper, we present RUMLEM, a lemmatizer that covers the five main varieties of Romansh as well as the supra-regional standard variety Rumantsch Grischun. It is based on comprehensive, community-driven morphological databases for Romansh, enabling RUMLEM to cover 77-84% of the words in a typical Romansh text. Since there is a dedicated database for each Romansh variety, an additional application of RUMLEM is variety-aware language classification. Evaluation on 30'000 Romansh texts of varying lengths shows that RUMLEM correctly identifies the variety in 95% of cases. In addition, a proof of concept demonstrates the feasibility of Romansh vs. non-Romansh language classification based on the lemmatizer.

cs.CL

Translation Asymmetry in LLMs as a Data Augmentation Factor: A Case Study for 6 Romansh Language Varieties

Recent strategies for low-resource machine translation rely on LLMs to generate synthetic data based on text in higher-resource languages. We revisit this idea for Romansh, a language with 6 distinct varieties. LLMs tend to confuse these varieties when translating into Romansh, but they are quite good at translating out of Romansh into a high-resource language such as German. Due to this asymmetry, the direction of data augmentation is a crucial choice. We find that contrary to recent strategies, creating synthetic translations into the higher-resource language is the superior approach, and only this approach allows us to surpass a Gemini 3 Pro baseline on German-Romansh translation (+23 BLEU over Gemini in the lowest-resource variety). A human evaluation confirms that our experiments yield the first model that generates fluent translations in the individual Romansh varieties.

cs.CL