MonTransformer: Self-Supervised Phonetic to Glyph Conversion Leveraging Positional Context for Traditional Mongolian Texts

Abstract

The traditional Mongolian script poses significant challenges for text rendering due to its vertical orientation, complex glyph variations, and context-dependent shapes, compounded by limited linguistic resources. This paper introduces the first method specifically designed to address the out-of-vocabulary (OOV) word problem in traditional Mongolian script conversion. We present a novel dataset and propose MonTransformer, the first Transformer-based model tailored for converting Unicode phonetic sequences into glyph sequences. MonTransformer utilizes dynamic optimization and contrastive learning to effectively manage OOV cases and improve sequence generation accuracy, transforming Unicode inputs into visually accurate glyph representations. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance, maintaining the script’s visual fidelity and advancing efforts in digital preservation for complex scripts.