William Gillies
2022
Use of Transformer-Based Models for Word-Level Transliteration of the Book of the Dean of Lismore
Edward Gow-Smith
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Mark McConville
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William Gillies
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Jade Scott
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Roibeard Ó Maolalaigh
Proceedings of the 4th Celtic Language Technology Workshop within LREC2022
The Book of the Dean of Lismore (BDL) is a 16th-century Scottish Gaelic manuscript written in a non-standard orthography. In this work, we outline the problem of transliterating the text of the BDL into a standardised orthography, and perform exploratory experiments using Transformer-based models for this task. In particular, we focus on the task of word-level transliteration, and achieve a character-level BLEU score of 54.15 with our best model, a BART architecture pre-trained on the text of Scottish Gaelic Wikipedia and then fine-tuned on around 2,000 word-level parallel examples. Our initial experiments give promising results, but we highlight the shortcomings of our model, and discuss directions for future work.