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 In response, we present a multi-task learning approach to restore and translate historical documents based on a self-attention mechanism, specifically utilizing two Korean historical records, ones of the most voluminous historical records in the world.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.
Anthology ID:
2021.naacl-main.317
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies
Month:
June
Year:
2021
Address:
Online
Editors:
Kristina Toutanova, Anna Rumshisky, Luke Zettlemoyer, Dilek Hakkani-Tur, Iz Beltagy, Steven Bethard, Ryan Cotterell, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Yichao Zhou
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4031–4042
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.317
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.naacl-main.317
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Kyeongpil Kang, Kyohoon Jin, Soyoung Yang, Soojin Jang, Jaegul Choo, and Youngbin Kim. 2021. Restoring and Mining the Records of the Joseon Dynasty via Neural Language Modeling and Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, pages 4031–4042, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Restoring and Mining the Records of the Joseon Dynasty via Neural Language Modeling and Machine Translation (Kang et al., NAACL 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.317.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.naacl-main.317.mp4