Recovering Missing Characters in Old Hawaiian Writing

Abstract

In contrast to the older writing system of the 19th century, modern Hawaiian orthography employs characters for long vowels and glottal stops. These extra characters account for about one-third of the phonemes in Hawaiian, so including them makes a big difference to reading comprehension and pronunciation. However, transliterating between older and newer texts is a laborious task when performed manually. We introduce two related methods to help solve this transliteration problem automatically. One approach is implemented, end-to-end, using finite state transducers (FSTs). The other is a hybrid deep learning approach, which approximately composes an FST with a recurrent neural network language model.

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Reproductions