Multi-Task Modeling of Phonographic Languages: Translating Middle Egyptian Hieroglyphs

Philipp Wiesenbach, Stefan Riezler


Abstract
Machine translation of ancient languages faces a low-resource problem, caused by the limited amount of available textual source data and their translations. We present a multi-task modeling approach to translating Middle Egyptian that is inspired by recent successful approaches to multi-task learning in end-to-end speech translation. We leverage the phonographic aspect of the hieroglyphic writing system, and show that similar to multi-task learning of speech recognition and translation, joint learning and sharing of structural information between hieroglyph transcriptions, translations, and POS tagging can improve direct translation of hieroglyphs by several BLEU points, using a minimal amount of manual transcriptions.
Anthology ID:
2019.iwslt-1.33
Volume:
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation
Month:
November 2-3
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong
Editors:
Jan Niehues, Rolando Cattoni, Sebastian Stüker, Matteo Negri, Marco Turchi, Thanh-Le Ha, Elizabeth Salesky, Ramon Sanabria, Loic Barrault, Lucia Specia, Marcello Federico
Venue:
IWSLT
SIG:
SIGSLT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2019.iwslt-1.33
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Philipp Wiesenbach and Stefan Riezler. 2019. Multi-Task Modeling of Phonographic Languages: Translating Middle Egyptian Hieroglyphs. In Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Spoken Language Translation, Hong Kong. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Multi-Task Modeling of Phonographic Languages: Translating Middle Egyptian Hieroglyphs (Wiesenbach & Riezler, IWSLT 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2019.iwslt-1.33.pdf