POS-tagging of Historical Dutch

Dieuwke Hupkes, Rens Bod


Abstract
We present a study of the adequacy of current methods that are used for POS-tagging historical Dutch texts, as well as an exploration of the influence of employing different techniques to improve upon the current practice. The main focus of this paper is on (unsupervised) methods that are easily adaptable for different domains without requiring extensive manual input. It was found that modernising the spelling of corpora prior to tagging them with a tagger trained on contemporary Dutch results in a large increase in accuracy, but that spelling normalisation alone is not sufficient to obtain state-of-the-art results. The best results were achieved by training a POS-tagger on a corpus automatically annotated by projecting (automatically assigned) POS-tags via word alignments from a contemporary corpus. This result is promising, as it was reached without including any domain knowledge or context dependencies. We argue that the insights of this study combined with semi-supervised learning techniques for domain adaptation can be used to develop a general-purpose diachronic tagger for Dutch.
Anthology ID:
L16-1012
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
77–82
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1012
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dieuwke Hupkes and Rens Bod. 2016. POS-tagging of Historical Dutch. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 77–82, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
POS-tagging of Historical Dutch (Hupkes & Bod, LREC 2016)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1012.pdf