TDR: Tagalog Diacritic Restoration Dataset

arXiv:2610.17597 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-10-13 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-10-13

Updated: 2026-10-13

Comments: Accepted at O-COCOSDA 2026

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The gist: Homographs are words that share identical spelling but differ in meaning and pronunciation.

Abstract

Homographs are words that share identical spelling but differ in meaning and pronunciation. In Tagalog, these distinctions are disambiguated in writing through tuldik (diacritical marks), which are rarely preserved in contemporary Tagalog text. This scarcity of diacritics limits diacritic restoration, which is useful for downstream tasks such as prosody selection for text-to-speech synthesis. To address this gap, this study introduces TDR, an annotated corpus of 40 frequent Tagalog homographs constructed from news text. It also introduces a collocation-driven retrieval method to expand the dataset and mitigate severe class imbalance among minor variants. Finally, we show that TDR supplies a capability absent from pretrained models, and that this capability can be learned by small, inexpensive models as well as by fine-tuned LLMs.

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