Compilation of a Synthetic J udeo- F rench Corpus (2024)

Abstract: This is a short paper describing the process of derivation of synthetic Judeo-French text. Judeo-French is one of a number of rare languages used in speaking and writing by Jewish communities as confined to a particular temporal and geographical frame (in this case, 11th- to 14th-century France). The number of resources in the language is very limited and its involvement in the contemporary domain of Natural Language Processing (NLP) is practically non-existent. This work outlines the compilation of a synthetic Judeo-French corpus. For the purpose, a pipeline of transformations is applied to Old French text belonging to the same general time period, leading to the derivation of text that is as reliable as possible in terms of phonological, morphological and lexical characteristics as witnessed in Judeo-French. Ultimately, the goal is for this synthetic corpus to be used in standard NLP tasks, such as Neural Machine Translation (NMT), as an instance of data augmentation.

## introduction when prompted to translate a text from old french to judeo-french, chatgpt offers a slightly altered and, strangely, modernised version of the source text, also written in latin script. asked to identify the rare language based on a short sample, it convincingly defines it as "hebrew". ## conclusion and future directions the current study provides a basis for major extension in terms of both breadth and depth. on one hand, a number of rare jewish languages share in their specificities as seen in relation to more common languages and language varieties spoken in the same time and geographical area. that is to say, judeo-french relates to old french in a similar manner that, for instance, judeo-italian relates to italian or judeo-greek relates to greek. minor modifications in the presented pipeline can therefore allow for the derivation of synthetic corpora in these languages. from an even broader perspective, the authors hope that through its detailed documentation and shared code, the study can encourage similar work with rare languages that are not related to the discussed one. on the other hand, this work's artefact in the face of a sample for data augmentation is only the beginning of what can become a larger and more sophisticated nlp system, such as a machine translation or summarisation model, whose usability would in turn be exponentially larger as authentic documents in judeo-french and related languages become translatable or otherwise more easily accessible in today's digital context.