Toward Creation of A ncash Lexical Resources from OCR (2021)

Abstract: The Quechua linguistic family has a limited number of NLP resources, most of them being dedicated to Southern Quechua, whereas the varieties of Central Quechua have, to the best of our knowledge, no specific resources (software, lexicon or corpus). Our work addresses this issue by producing two resources for the Ancash Quechua: a full digital version of a dictionary, and an OCR model adapted to the considered variety. In this paper, we describe the steps towards this goal: we first measure performances of existing models for the task of digitising a Quechua dictionary, then adapt a model for the Ancash variety, and finally create a reliable resource for NLP in XML-TEI format. We hope that this work will be a basis for initiating NLP projects for Central Quechua, and that it will encourage digitisation initiatives for under-resourced languages.

## introduction in recent years, quechua has become more visible in the countries where it is spoken, partly as a result of measures to strengthen its use in institutions, but also of a growing interest in these languages as a cultural element among citizens. at the same time, quechua languages are gradually handled by nlp software. for southern quechua (variety of quechua ii, the most widespread linguistic family), resources already exist and many projects are experimenting large corpus digitisation to create deep learning models 1 . however, quechua varieties are heterogeneous and available resources for the aforementioned variety are hardly usable for others, because of important differences in both morphology and lexicon. the present work aims at laying foundations for the development of nlp tools for another variety, the ancash quechua (variety of quechua i). 1 as the oscar corpus https://oscar-corpus. com the main steps describes in this paper are as folan online cross-dialectal lexicon @xcite , featuring about 1,800 entries for ancash, is downloadable in spreadsheet format. this format can be easily used for nlp, but the lexicon contains some redundancies, discrepancies and formatting irregularities. the largest ancash quechua-spanish dictionaries are either not officially digitised or have been published under restrictive copyright that prevent their use for nlp purposes. the main dictionaries for our variety are: swisshelm, 1972, 399 pages, @xcite , about 8,000 entries, also available as an ebook. ## lexical resource during the manual correction of the ocred text, each entry was copied into an ods file in order to preserve the structure. the resulting file is composed of 5 columns containing the elements described in section 3.1. having been reviewed several times, this resource is already available online foot_5 . in order to distribute this resource in a format suitable for a large variety of tools, the ods file (previously converted to csv) is automatically converted to an xml-tei foot_6 format, following the guidelines for xml encoding of dictionaries @xcite . the markup structure is built with the following rules : our xml-tei lexicon contains 3626 entries, and is to date the largest digital resource for ancash quechua available for nlp and lexicometry. ## conclusion the present work shows that it is relatively easy to train a new tesseract model from an existing one, with very little data. the tests carried out on several ocrs show many that alternatives are available for this task depending on the desired output. based on this work, we started the digitisation of a second dictionary and a corpus with the same characteristics.