Contemporary machine translation systems prioritize fluent, natural-sounding output with flexible word ordering. In contrast, interlinear translation maintains the source text’s syntactic structure by aligning target language words directly beneath their source counterparts. Despite its importance in classical scholarship, automated approaches to interlinear translation remain understudied. We evaluated neural interlinear translation from Ancient Greek to English and Polish using four transformer-based models: two Ancient Greek-specialized (GreTa and PhilTa) and two general-purpose multilingual models (mT5-base and mT5-large). Our approach introduces novel morphological embedding layers and evaluates text preprocessing and tag set selection across 144 experimental configurations using a word-aligned parallel corpus of the Greek New Testament. Results show that morphological features through dedicated embedding layers significantly enhance translation quality, improving BLEU scores by 35% (44.67 → 60.40) for English and 38% (42.92 → 59.33) for Polish compared to baseline models. PhilTa achieves state-of-the-art performance for English, while mT5-large does so for Polish. Notably, PhilTa maintains stable performance using only 10% of training data. Our findings challenge the assumption that modern neural architectures cannot benefit from explicit morphological annotations. While preprocessing strategies and tag set selection show minimal impact, the substantial gains from morphological embeddings demonstrate their value in low-resource scenarios.

Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have spurred remarkable progress in language modeling, predominantly benefiting English. While Ukrainian NLP has long grappled with significant challenges due to limited data and computational resources, recent years have seen a shift with the emergence of new corpora, marking a pivotal moment in addressing these obstacles. This paper introduces LiBERTa Large, the inaugural BERT Large model pre-trained entirely from scratch only on Ukrainian texts. Leveraging extensive multilingual text corpora, including a substantial Ukrainian subset, LiBERTa Large establishes a foundational resource for Ukrainian NLU tasks. Our model outperforms existing multilingual and monolingual models pre-trained from scratch for Ukrainian, demonstrating competitive performance against those relying on cross-lingual transfer from English. This achievement underscores our ability to achieve superior performance through pre-training from scratch with additional enhancements, obviating the need to rely on decisions made for English models to efficiently transfer weights. We establish LiBERTa Large as a robust baseline, paving the way for future advancements in Ukrainian language modeling.