Script Normalization for Unconventional Writing of Under-Resourced Languages in Bilingual Communities

Sina Ahmadi; Antonios Anastasopoulos

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arXiv · 2305.16407

Script Normalization for Unconventional Writing of Under-Resourced Languages in Bilingual Communities

Sina Ahmadi·Antonios Anastasopoulos

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Abstract

The wide accessibility of social media has provided linguistically under-represented communities with an extraordinary opportunity to create content in their native languages. This, however, comes with certain challenges in script normalization, particularly where the speakers of a language in a bilingual community rely on another script or orthography to write their native language. This paper addresses the problem of script normalization for several such languages that are mainly written in a Perso-Arabic script. Using synthetic data with various levels of noise and a transformer-based model, we demonstrate that the problem can be effectively remediated. We conduct a small-scale evaluation of real data as well. Our experiments indicate that script normalization is also beneficial to improve the performance of downstream tasks such as machine translation and language identification.

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Sina Ahmadi, Antonios Anastasopoulos. 2023-05-25. Script Normalization for Unconventional Writing of Under-Resourced Languages in Bilingual Communities. https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.16407

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