Lost in Translation? Exploring the Shift in Grammatical Gender from Latin to Occitan

Hugging Face Daily Papers Papers

Summary

A deep learning framework is developed to analyze grammatical gender evolution from Latin to Romance languages, focusing on low-resource historical settings using lexical and contextual analysis.

The diachronic evolution from Latin to the Romance languages involved a restructuring of the grammatical gender system from a tripartite configuration (masculine, feminine, neuter) to a bipartite one (masculine, feminine) in most Romance languages. In this work, we introduce an interpretable deep learning framework to investigate this phenomenon at both lexical and contextual levels. First, we show that conventional tokenization strategies are insufficiently robust for this low-resource historical setting, and that our proposed tokenizer improves performance over these baselines. At the lexical level, we evaluate the contribution of morphological features to gender prediction. At the contextual level, we quantify the contributions of different part-of-speech categories to grammatical gender prediction. Together, these analyses characterize the distribution of gender information between the lemma and its sentential context. We make our codebase, datasets, and results publicly available at https://github.com/ahan-2000/Lost-in-Translation-{https://github.com/ahan-2000/Lost-in-Translation-}.
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Paper page - Lost in Translation? Exploring the Shift in Grammatical Gender from Latin to Occitan

Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2605.09156

Abstract

A deep learning framework is developed to analyze the grammatical gender system evolution from Latin to Romance languages, examining both lexical and contextual factors in a low-resource historical setting.

The diachronic evolution from Latin to the Romance languages involved a restructuring of the grammatical gender system from a tripartite configuration (masculine, feminine, neuter) to a bipartite one (masculine, feminine) in most Romance languages. In this work, we introduce an interpretabledeep learning frameworkto investigate this phenomenon at both lexical andcontextual levels. First, we show that conventionaltokenizationstrategies are insufficiently robust for this low-resource historical setting, and that our proposed tokenizer improves performance over these baselines. At thelexical level, we evaluate the contribution ofmorphological featurestogender prediction. At thecontextual level, we quantify the contributions of differentpart-of-speech categoriesto grammaticalgender prediction. Together, these analyses characterize the distribution of gender information between the lemma and its sentential context. We make our codebase, datasets, and results publicly available at https://github.com/ahan-2000/Lost-in-Translation-{https://github.com/ahan-2000/Lost-in-Translation-}.

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