Crinmatic/Diacritic-Restoration
Domain:
natural language processingRecord type:
project
Creator:
Cri
Host:
Using AI to restore Diacritics on Yoruba language (which is a low resource language)
## **Diacritic-Restoration**
A project on diacritic restoration of languages...
#### *Cotributors*
- Alagbe Seun
- Alao David
|Contributor | Social Media post | Article |
|:--|:--|:--|
|Alao David | LinkedIn| |
|Alagbe Seun | LinkedIn | Medium|
### The Problem:
Yoruba or more specifically "Èdè Yorùbá" is a major language, spoken by the indigenous people of the **Yoruba** tribe in Nigeria (more than **45 million** people globally).
**The significance of solving this problem is evidenced by this analysis below:**
“Yoruba is a tonal language and Diacritics are used to mark the tone of a vowel. The dot accent or alternatively the vertical line below, are used to mark open variants of vowels, namely ẹ and ọ for [ɛ] and [ɔ]; or below the s which transcribes the [ʃ], a post-alveolar consonant like 'sh' in English.”
Given below are Yoruba vowel classification:
```
a => (á à ā)
e => (é è ē ẹ/e̩ ẹ́/é̩ ẹ̀/è̩ ẹ̄/ē̩
i => (í ì ī)
o => (ó ò ō ọ/o̩ ọ́/ó̩ ọ̀/ò̩ ọ̄/ō̩)
s => (ṣ s)
u => (ú ù ū)
```
Using these letters interchangeably, gives different meanings to words as they are pronounced differently.
For example :
```
A) oro = oró
As in “oh-row” (oró is “sting” when translated to English)
B)oro = ọ̀rọ̀
As in “aw-raw” (ọ̀rọ̀ is “text” or "word" when translated to English)
C) ojo = òjò
As in “oh-joe” (òjò is “rain” when translated to English)
D) ojo = ọjọ́
As in “or-jaw” (ọjọ́ is “day” when translated to English)
```
It's awesome right?
Unfortunately, there's a problem. Words might be easy to pronounce (maybe not so much for beginners), but when it comes to writing or typing "Yoruba" text, we often disregard the "TONE MARKS", leading to the following:
1) We end up fumbling the tone marks for each words, we intend on typing (even if we know how to pronounce it well)
2) Some people just get lazy when putting the "TONE MARKS" because it takes quite a while for them to transcribe plain words and add the "TONE MARKS".
### The Solution:
Excerpt from [ …