FreEM SemiD norm

FreEM SemiD norm (French Early Modern Semi-Diplomatic Normalisation) refers both to:

• a normalisation model, and
• the normalised corpus used to develop it — a dataset of Middle French texts, normalised according to semi-diplomatic guidelines.

Funder

This research was conducted as part of the SETAF project, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). Project number: 205056.

• 🔗 SETAF project GitHub
• 🌐 SETAF project website

How to cite our work

• Our paper:

Sonia Solfrini, Mylène Dejouy, Aurélia Marques Oliveira, Pierre-Olivier Beaulnes. « Normaliser le moyen français : du graphématique au semi-diplomatique », actes de CORIA-TALN-RJCRI-RECITAL 2025, juillet 2025, Marseille, France. ⟨hal-05137564⟩.

• Our corpus:

@misc{FreEM-SemiD-norm_dataset_2025,
  author       = {Solfrini, Sonia and
                  Dejouy, Mylène and
                  Marques Oliveira, Aurélia and
                  Beaulnes, Pierre-Olivier},
  title        = {{FreEM SemiD norm corpus}},
  month        = may,
  year         = 2025,
  howpublished = {\url{https://github.com/soniasol/FreEM-SemiD-norm}},
  note         = {Accessed Month Day, Year}
}

• Our model:

@misc{FreEM-SemiD-norm_model_2025,
  author       = {Solfrini, Sonia and
                  Gabay, Simon},
  title        = {{FreEM SemiD norm model}},
  month        = may,
  year         = 2025,
  publisher    = {Zenodo},
  note         = {{v.} 1.0.0},
  doi          = {10.5281/zenodo.15551750},
  url          = {https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15551750},
}

License

• The dataset is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
• The code and scripts in this repository are released under the MIT License.

Contact

For questions or contributions, please contact Sonia Solfrini at Sonia.Solfrini@unige.ch.

Dataset

Our corpus is available in the dataset folder. It is organized as follows:

• corpus-to-process/
  Contains each text in plain .txt format: one file with the original text and one file with the normalised version. A script is included to convert and merge these files into .tsv format.

• corpus/
  Contains each text in .tsv format. Each file includes two columns:

  • the original lines of text
  • the corresponding normalised lines

• split/
  Contains the dataset divided into training, validation, and test sets. See the scripts section below for details on how the split was generated.

• data/
  Contains the split corpus in source–target format:

  • train.src / train.trg
  • dev.src / dev.trg
  • test.src / test.trg

A detailed overview of the corpus content, including text titles and metadata, is available in table.csv.

Scripts

See the scripts folder for all scripts used in our experiments, along with a README.md that outlines the steps followed to train and evaluate the model.

Other files

The other-files folder includes additional resources such as subword-tokenized files, BPE vocabularies/models, intermediate outputs, and evaluation results. A README.md in this folder explains further the structure and usage of these files, which support model training and evaluation with Fairseq.

Results

Our results are available in the results folder.

We experimented with multiple LSTM-based model configurations (XS, S, M) and vocabulary sizes. The best results were obtained using the "S" configuration (2 encoder/decoder layers, 256 embedding dim, 512 hidden size) with a vocabulary of 1,000 subword units:

Configuration	BLEU	TER	ChrF
XS	86.64	7.69	94.93
S	87.08	7.35	95.02
M	86.18	7.76	94.70

Model

The best-performing trained model is available in the Releases section of this repository and on Zenodo: .