Benjamin Suter


2022

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Nunc profana tractemus. Detecting Code-Switching in a Large Corpus of 16th Century Letters
Martin Volk | Lukas Fischer | Patricia Scheurer | Bernard Silvan Schroffenegger | Raphael Schwitter | Phillip Ströbel | Benjamin Suter
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference

This paper is based on a collection of 16th century letters from and to the Zurich reformer Heinrich Bullinger. Around 12,000 letters of this exchange have been preserved, out of which 3100 have been professionally edited, and another 5500 are available as provisional transcriptions. We have investigated code-switching in these 8600 letters, first on the sentence-level and then on the word-level. In this paper we give an overview of the corpus and its language mix (mostly Early New High German and Latin, but also French, Greek, Italian and Hebrew). We report on our experiences with a popular language identifier and present our results when training an alternative identifier on a very small training corpus of only 150 sentences per language. We use the automatically labeled sentences in order to bootstrap a word-based language classifier which works with high accuracy. Our research around the corpus building and annotation involves automatic handwritten text recognition, text normalisation for ENH German, and machine translation from medieval Latin into modern German.

2020

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Grapheme-to-Phoneme Conversion with a Multilingual Transformer Model
Omnia ElSaadany | Benjamin Suter
Proceedings of the 17th SIGMORPHON Workshop on Computational Research in Phonetics, Phonology, and Morphology

In this paper, we describe our three submissions to the SIGMORPHON 2020 shared task 1 on grapheme-to-phoneme conversion for 15 languages. We experimented with a single multilingual transformer model. We observed that the multilingual model achieves results on par with our separately trained monolingual models and is even able to avoid a few of the errors made by the monolingual models.