Lemmatisation of Medieval Greek: Against the Limits of Transformer’s Capabilities?

Colin Swaelens, Pranaydeep Singh, Ilse de Vos, Els Lefever


Abstract
This paper presents preliminary experiments for the lemmatisation of unedited, Byzantine Greek epigrams. This type of Greek is quite different from its classical ancestor, mostly because of its orthographic inconsistencies. Existing lemmatisation algorithms display an accuracy drop of around 30pp when tested on these Byzantine book epigrams. We conducted seven different lemmatisation experiments, which were either transformer-based or based on neural edit-trees. The best performing lemmatiser was a hybrid method combining transformer-based embeddings with a dictionary look-up. We compare our results with existing lemmatisers, and provide a detailed error analysis revealing why unedited, Byzantine Greek is so challenging for lemmatisation.
Anthology ID:
2024.lrec-main.899
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
Month:
May
Year:
2024
Address:
Torino, Italia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
Venues:
LREC | COLING
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA and ICCL
Note:
Pages:
10293–10302
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.899
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Colin Swaelens, Pranaydeep Singh, Ilse de Vos, and Els Lefever. 2024. Lemmatisation of Medieval Greek: Against the Limits of Transformer’s Capabilities?. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 10293–10302, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
Cite (Informal):
Lemmatisation of Medieval Greek: Against the Limits of Transformer’s Capabilities? (Swaelens et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.899.pdf