In plain words: A new open collection pairs 2,891 Etruscan inscriptions with English translations gathered from academic sources, giving this dead language its first public training set for translation. A small translation model trained on it scored 10.1 on a standard translation-quality scale.
Abstract
Etruscan is an ancient language spoken in Italy from the 7th century BC to the 1st century AD. There are no native speakers of the language at the present day, and its resources are scarce, as there exist only around 12,000 known inscriptions. To the best of our knowledge, there are no publicly available Etruscan corpora for natural language processing. Therefore, we propose a dataset for machine translation from Etruscan to English, which contains 2891 translated examples from existing academic sources. Some examples are extracted manually, while others are acquired in an automatic way. Along with the dataset, we benchmark different machine translation models observing that it is possible to achieve a BLEU score of 10.1 with a small transformer model. Releasing the dataset can help enable future research on this language, similar languages or other languages with scarce resources.
Gianluca Vico, Gerasimos Spanakis
arXiv:2310.05688 · cs.CL · submitted Oct 9, 2023
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