OtoBERT: Identifying Suffixed Verbal Forms in Modern Hebrew Literature

AbstractWe provide a solution for a specific morphological obstacle which often makes Hebrew literature difficult to parse for the younger generation. The morphologically-rich nature of the Hebrew language allows pronominal direct objects to be realized as bound morphemes, suffixed to the verb. Although such suffixes are often utilized in Biblical Hebrew, their use has all but disappeared in modern Hebrew. Nevertheless, authors of modern Hebrew literature, in their search for literary flair, do make use of such forms. These unusual forms are notorious for alienating young readers from Hebrew literature, especially because these rare suffixed forms are often orthographically identical to common Hebrew words with different meanings. Upon encountering such words, readers naturally select the usual analysis of the word; yet, upon completing the sentence, they find themselves confounded. Young readers end up feeling “tricked”, and this in turn contributes to their alienation from the text. In order to address this challenge, we pretrained a new BERT model specifically geared to identify such forms, so that they may be automatically simplified and/or flagged. We release this new BERT model to the public for unrestricted use.