Processing South Asian Languages Written in the Latin Script: the Dakshina Dataset
This addresses the problem of processing South Asian languages in Latin script for researchers and practitioners in natural language processing, though it is incremental as it builds on existing resources by adding new data.
The paper introduces the Dakshina dataset, which provides text in both Latin and native scripts for 12 South Asian languages, including Wikipedia text, romanization lexicons, and parallel sentence data, and offers baseline results for tasks like transliteration and language modeling.
This paper describes the Dakshina dataset, a new resource consisting of text in both the Latin and native scripts for 12 South Asian languages. The dataset includes, for each language: 1) native script Wikipedia text; 2) a romanization lexicon; and 3) full sentence parallel data in both a native script of the language and the basic Latin alphabet. We document the methods used for preparation and selection of the Wikipedia text in each language; collection of attested romanizations for sampled lexicons; and manual romanization of held-out sentences from the native script collections. We additionally provide baseline results on several tasks made possible by the dataset, including single word transliteration, full sentence transliteration, and language modeling of native script and romanized text. Keywords: romanization, transliteration, South Asian languages