Recovering Missing Characters in Old Hawaiian Writing

Brendan Shillingford, Oiwi Parker Jones


Abstract
In contrast to the older writing system of the 19th century, modern Hawaiian orthography employs characters for long vowels and glottal stops. These extra characters account for about one-third of the phonemes in Hawaiian, so including them makes a big difference to reading comprehension and pronunciation. However, transliterating between older and newer texts is a laborious task when performed manually. We introduce two related methods to help solve this transliteration problem automatically. One approach is implemented, end-to-end, using finite state transducers (FSTs). The other is a hybrid deep learning approach, which approximately composes an FST with a recurrent neural network language model.
Anthology ID:
D18-1533
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October-November
Year:
2018
Address:
Brussels, Belgium
Editors:
Ellen Riloff, David Chiang, Julia Hockenmaier, Jun’ichi Tsujii
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4929–4934
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1533
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D18-1533
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Brendan Shillingford and Oiwi Parker Jones. 2018. Recovering Missing Characters in Old Hawaiian Writing. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4929–4934, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Recovering Missing Characters in Old Hawaiian Writing (Shillingford & Parker Jones, EMNLP 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/D18-1533.pdf
Attachment:
 D18-1533.Attachment.pdf