A Machine Translation Approach for Modernizing Historical Documents Using Backtranslation

Miguel Domingo, Francisco Casacuberta


Abstract
Human language evolves with the passage of time. This makes historical documents to be hard to comprehend by contemporary people and, thus, limits their accessibility to scholars specialized in the time period in which a certain document was written. Modernization aims at breaking this language barrier and increase the accessibility of historical documents to a broader audience. To do so, it generates a new version of a historical document, written in the modern version of the document’s original language. In this work, we propose several machine translation approaches for modernizing historical documents. We tested these approaches in different scenarios, obtaining very encouraging results.
Anthology ID:
2018.iwslt-1.6
Volume:
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation
Month:
October 29-30
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels
Editors:
Marco Turchi, Jan Niehues, Marcello Frederico
Venue:
IWSLT
SIG:
SIGSLT
Publisher:
International Conference on Spoken Language Translation
Note:
Pages:
39–47
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2018.iwslt-1.6
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Miguel Domingo and Francisco Casacuberta. 2018. A Machine Translation Approach for Modernizing Historical Documents Using Backtranslation. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation, pages 39–47, Brussels. International Conference on Spoken Language Translation.
Cite (Informal):
A Machine Translation Approach for Modernizing Historical Documents Using Backtranslation (Domingo & Casacuberta, IWSLT 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2018.iwslt-1.6.pdf