Papers › Text normalization for low-resource languages: the case of Ligurian

Text normalization for low-resource languages: the case of Ligurian

16 Jun 2022arXiv:2206.07861archive 2025-07-28

Stefano Lusito, Edoardo Ferrante, Jean Maillard

Text normalization is a crucial technology for low-resource languages which lack rigid spelling conventions or that have undergone multiple spelling reforms. Low-resource text normalization has so far relied upon hand-crafted rules, which are perceived to be more data efficient than neural methods. In this paper we examine the case of text normalization for Ligurian, an endangered Romance language. We collect 4,394 Ligurian sentences paired with their normalized versions, as well as the first open source monolingual corpus for Ligurian. We show that, in spite of the small amounts of data available, a compact transformer-based model can be trained to achieve very low error rates by the use of backtranslation and appropriate tokenization.

PaperPDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

fleanend/fairseq-text-normalizer officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Text Normalization

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections