DATASHI: A Parallel English–Tashlhiyt Corpus for Orthography Normalization and Low-Resource Language Processing.

Nasser-Eddine Monir, Zakaria Baou


Abstract
DATASHI is a new parallel English–Tashlhiyt corpus that fills a critical gap in computational resources for Amazigh languages. It contains 5,000 sentence pairs, including a 1,500-sentence subset with expert-standardized and non-standard user-generated versions, enabling systematic study of orthographic diversity and normalization. This dual design supports text-based NLP tasks—such as tokenization, translation, and normalization—and also serves as a foundation for read-speech data collection and multimodal alignment. Comprehensive evaluations with state-of-the-art Large Language Models (GPT-5, Claude Sonnet 4.5, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Mistral, Qwen3-Max) show clear improvements from zero-shot to few-shot prompting, with Gemini 2.5 Pro achieving the lowest word and character-level error rates and exhibiting robust cross-lingual generalization. A fine-grained analysis of edit operations—deletions, substitutions, and insertions—across phonological classes (geminates, emphatics, uvulars, and pharyngeals) further highlights model-specific sensitivities to marked Tashlhiyt features and provides new diagnostic insights for low-resource Amazigh orthography normalization.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-1.153
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
1947–1956
Language:
External URL:
https://lrec.elra.info/lrec2026-main-153
DOI:
10.63317/2zekkx242a7h
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nasser-Eddine Monir and Zakaria Baou. 2026. DATASHI: A Parallel English–Tashlhiyt Corpus for Orthography Normalization and Low-Resource Language Processing.. In Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 1947–1956, Palma de Mallorca, Spain. ELRA Language Resource Association.
Cite (Informal):
DATASHI: A Parallel English–Tashlhiyt Corpus for Orthography Normalization and Low-Resource Language Processing. (Monir & Baou, LREC 2026)
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