Transliterating Nôm Scripts into Vietnamese National Scripts using Statistical Machine Translation

Nôm scripts were used as the Vietnamese writing system from the 10th century to the early 20th century. During this period, Nôm scripts were the means to record a broad range of historical events, literary works, medical knowledge, as well as wisdom of many other domains. Unfortunately, since hardly any native Vietnamese speaker can read Nôm scripts nowadays, these valuable documents have not been fully harnessed. To address this gap, it is necessary to build an automatic transliteration system that can support us in decoding the ancient scripts and gaining knowledge of our Vietnamese ancestors. This study focuses on categorizing and reviewing the current progress on the Statistical Machine Translation (SMT) approaches to transliterate Nôm scripts into Vietnamese national scripts. In this paper, we discuss the differences between Nôm scripts and Vietnamese national scripts, systematically compare SMT models in transliterating Nôm scripts into Vietnamese national scripts, as well as having a thorough outlook on several promising research directions.

@article{Dinh2021,
  title     = {Transliterating Nôm Scripts into Vietnamese National Scripts using Statistical Machine Translation},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {12},
  number    = {2},
  year      = {2021},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Dien Dinh and Phuong Nguyen and Long H. B. Nguyen},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120205},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2021.0120205}
}