Preparing an endangered language for the digital age: the case of
Judeo-Spanish
Öktem, AlpORCID: 0000-0002-0700-1159, Zevallos, Rodolfo, Moslem, YasminORCID: 0000-0003-4595-6877, Öztürk, Güneş and Şarhon, Karen Gerson
(2022)
Preparing an endangered language for the digital age: the case of
Judeo-Spanish.
In: Workshop on Resources and Technologies for Indigenous, Endangered and Lesser-resourced Languages in Eurasia within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, 20 June 2022, Marseille, France.
We develop machine translation and speech synthesis systems to complement the efforts of revitalizing Judeo-Spanish, the
exiled language of Sephardic Jews, which survived for centuries, but now faces the threat of extinction in the digital age.
Building on resources created by the Sephardic community of Turkey and elsewhere, we create corpora and tools that would
help preserve this language for future generations. For machine translation, we first develop a Spanish to Judeo-Spanish
rule-based machine translation system, in order to generate large volumes of synthetic parallel data in the relevant language
pairs: Turkish, English and Spanish. Then, we train baseline neural machine translation engines using this synthetic data
and authentic parallel data created from translations by the Sephardic community. For text-to-speech synthesis, we present a
3.5 hour single speaker speech corpus for building a neural speech synthesis engine. Resources, model weights and online
inference engines are shared publicly.
Proceedings of the Workshop on Resources and Technologies for Indigenous, Endangered and Lesser-resourced Languages in Eurasia within the 13th Language Resources and Evaluation Conference.
.
European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
European Union via “Grant Scheme for Common Cultural Heritage: Preservation and Dialogue between Turkey and the EU (CCH-II), Science Foundation Ireland Centre for Research Training in Digitally-Enhanced Reality (d-real) under Grant No. 18/CRT/6224, Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) Research Centres Programme (Grant No. 13/RC/2106), European Regional Development Fund
ID Code:
28325
Deposited On:
11 May 2023 12:11 by
Thomas Murtagh
. Last Modified 11 May 2023 12:11
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