Abstract
The LEAFTOP (language extracted automatically from thousands of passages) dataset consists of nouns that appear in multiple
places in the four gospels of the New Testament. We use a naive approach — probabilistic inference — to identify likely
translations in 1480 other languages. We evaluate this process and find that it provides lexiconaries with accuracy from 42%
(Korafe) to 99% (Runyankole), averaging 72% correct across evaluated languages. The process translates up to 161 distinct
lemmas from Koine Greek (average 159). We identify nouns which appear to be easy and hard to translate, language families
where this technique works, and future possible improvements and extensions. The claims to novelty are: the use of a Koine
Greek New Testament as the source language; using a fully-annotated manually-created grammatically parse of the source
text; a custom scraper for texts in the target languages; a new metric for language similarity; a novel strategy for evaluation on
low-resource languages.
places in the four gospels of the New Testament. We use a naive approach — probabilistic inference — to identify likely
translations in 1480 other languages. We evaluate this process and find that it provides lexiconaries with accuracy from 42%
(Korafe) to 99% (Runyankole), averaging 72% correct across evaluated languages. The process translates up to 161 distinct
lemmas from Koine Greek (average 159). We identify nouns which appear to be easy and hard to translate, language families
where this technique works, and future possible improvements and extensions. The claims to novelty are: the use of a Koine
Greek New Testament as the source language; using a fully-annotated manually-created grammatically parse of the source
text; a custom scraper for texts in the target languages; a new metric for language similarity; a novel strategy for evaluation on
low-resource languages.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | LREC 2022 conference proceedings |
| Editors | Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis |
| Place of Publication | Paris |
| Publisher | European Language Resources Association (ELRA) |
| Pages | 5021-5028 |
| Number of pages | 8 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9791095546726 |
| Publication status | Published - 2022 |
| Event | Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (13th : 2022) - Marseille, France Duration: 20 Jun 2022 → 25 Jun 2022 Conference number: 13th |
Conference
| Conference | Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (13th : 2022) |
|---|---|
| Abbreviated title | LREC 2022 |
| Country/Territory | France |
| City | Marseille |
| Period | 20/06/22 → 25/06/22 |
Bibliographical note
Copyright the Publisher. Version archived for private and non-commercial use with the permission of the author/s and according to publisher conditions. For further rights please contact the publisher.Alternative title: "Proceedings of the 13th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2022)"
Keywords
- leaftop
- bible
- corpus
- Koine Greek
- lexicon
- low-resource languages