Lemmatisation of Medieval Greek: Against the Limits of Transformer’s Capabilities?

Abstract

This paper presents preliminary experiments for the lemmatisation of unedited, Byzantine Greek epigrams. This type of Greek is quite different from its classical ancestor, mostly because of its orthographic inconsistencies. Existing lemmatisation algorithms display an accuracy drop of around 30pp when tested on these Byzantine book epigrams. We conducted seven different lemmatisation experiments, which were either transformer-based or based on neural edit-trees. The best performing lemmatiser was a hybrid method combining transformer-based embeddings with a dictionary look-up. We compare our results with existing lemmatisers, and provide a detailed error analysis revealing why unedited, Byzantine Greek is so challenging for lemmatisation.

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