A Multi-Orthography Parallel Corpus of Yiddish Nouns

Jonne Saleva


Abstract
Yiddish is a low-resource language belonging to the Germanic language family and written using the Hebrew alphabet. As a language, Yiddish can be considered resource-poor as it lacks both public accessible corpora and a widely-used standard orthography, with various countries and organizations influencing the spellings speakers use. While existing corpora of Yiddish text do exist, they are often only written in a single, potentially non-standard orthography, with no parallel version with standard orthography available. In this work, we introduce the first multi-orthography parallel corpus of Yiddish nouns built by scraping word entries from Wiktionary. We also demonstrate how the corpus can be used to bootstrap a transliteration model using the Sequitur-G2P grapheme-to-phoneme conversion toolkit to map between various orthographies. Our trained system achieves error rates between 16.79% and 28.47% on the test set, depending on the orthographies considered. In addition to quantitative analysis, we also conduct qualitative error analysis of the trained system, concluding that non-phonetically spelled Hebrew words are the largest cause of error. We conclude with remarks regarding future work and release the corpus and associated code under a permissive license for the larger community to use.
Anthology ID:
2020.lrec-1.119
Volume:
Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2020
Address:
Marseille, France
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Frédéric Béchet, Philippe Blache, Khalid Choukri, Christopher Cieri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Hitoshi Isahara, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Hélène Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
948–952
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.119
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Jonne Saleva. 2020. A Multi-Orthography Parallel Corpus of Yiddish Nouns. In Proceedings of the Twelfth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 948–952, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
A Multi-Orthography Parallel Corpus of Yiddish Nouns (Saleva, LREC 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.lrec-1.119.pdf