Larth: Dataset and Machine Translation for Etruscan
Gianluca Vico Gerasimos Spanakis
Etruscan is an ancient language spoken in Italy from the 7th century BC to
the 1st century AD. There are no native speakers of the language at the present
day, and its resources are scarce, as there exist only around 12,000 known
inscriptions. To the best of our knowledge, there are no publicly available
Etruscan corpora for natural language processing. Therefore, we propose a
dataset for machine translation from Etruscan to English, which contains 2891
translated examples from existing academic sources. Some examples are extracted
manually, while others are acquired in an automatic way. Along with the
dataset, we benchmark different machine translation models observing that it is
possible to achieve a BLEU score of 10.1 with a small transformer model.
Releasing the dataset can help enable future research on this language, similar
languages or other languages with scarce resources.