Restoring and Mining the Records of the Joseon Dynasty via Neural Language Modeling and Machine Translation
Kyeongpil Kang, Kyohoon Jin, Soyoung Yang, Soojin Jang, Jaegul Choo, Youngbin Kim
Abstract
Understanding voluminous historical records provides clues on the past in various aspects, such as social and political issues and even natural science facts. However, it is generally difficult to fully utilize the historical records, since most of the documents are not written in a modern language and part of the contents are damaged over time. As a result, restoring the damaged or unrecognizable parts as well as translating the records into modern languages are crucial tasks. In response, we present a multi-task learning approach to restore and translate historical documents based on a self-attention mechanism, specifically utilizing two Korean historical records, ones of the most voluminous historical records in the world. Experimental results show that our approach significantly improves the accuracy of the translation task than baselines without multi-task learning. In addition, we present an in-depth exploratory analysis on our translated results via topic modeling, uncovering several significant historical events.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{kang-etal-2021-restoring,
title = "Restoring and Mining the Records of the {J}oseon Dynasty via Neural Language Modeling and Machine Translation",
author = "Kang, Kyeongpil and
Jin, Kyohoon and
Yang, Soyoung and
Jang, Soojin and
Choo, Jaegul and
Kim, Youngbin",
editor = "Toutanova, Kristina and
Rumshisky, Anna and
Zettlemoyer, Luke and
Hakkani-Tur, Dilek and
Beltagy, Iz and
Bethard, Steven and
Cotterell, Ryan and
Chakraborty, Tanmoy and
Zhou, Yichao",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies",
month = jun,
year = "2021",
address = "Online",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.317/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.317",
pages = "4031--4042"
}