The Construction and Evaluation of the LEAFTOP Dataset of Automatically Extracted Nouns in 1480 Languages

TL;DR

This paper introduces the LEAFTOP dataset of nouns across 1480 languages, using probabilistic inference to translate and evaluate nouns from the Greek New Testament, highlighting challenges and potential improvements.

Contribution

It presents a novel methodology combining a Greek source, manual parsing, and custom tools to automatically extract and evaluate nouns in a large number of languages, including low-resource ones.

Findings

Average translation accuracy of 72% across languages

Translates up to 161 lemmas from Koine Greek

Identifies easy and hard nouns for translation

Abstract

The LEAFTOP (language extracted automatically from thousands of passages) dataset consists of nouns that appear in multiple places in the four gospels of the New Testament. We use a naive approach -- probabilistic inference -- to identify likely translations in 1480 other languages. We evaluate this process and find that it provides lexiconaries with accuracy from 42% (Korafe) to 99% (Runyankole), averaging 72% correct across evaluated languages. The process translates up to 161 distinct lemmas from Koine Greek (average 159). We identify nouns which appear to be easy and hard to translate, language families where this technique works, and future possible improvements and extensions. The claims to novelty are: the use of a Koine Greek New Testament as the source language; using a fully-annotated manually-created grammatically parse of the source text; a custom scraper for texts in the target languages; a new metric for language similarity; a novel strategy for evaluation on low-resource languages.