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Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 22:1 (2017) ► pp.107–140

An automatic part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German

| Ghent University
| Ghent University
| Ghent University
| Ghent University
| Ghent University

Syntactically annotated corpora are highly important for enabling large-scale diachronic and diatopic language research. Such corpora have recently been developed for a variety of historical languages, or are still under development. One of those under development is the fully tagged and parsed Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG), which is aimed at facilitating research into the highly under-researched diachronic syntax of Low German. The present paper reports on a crucial step in creating the corpus, viz. the creation of a part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German (MLG). Having been transmitted in several non-standardised written varieties, MLG poses a challenge to standard POS taggers, which usually rely on normalized spelling. We outline the major issues faced in the creation of the tagger and present our solutions to them.

Keywords: historical linguistics, part-of-speech tagging, conditional random fields, feature selection, normalization
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Related work on historical corpora of German
    • 2.1Other varieties of historical Low German
    • 2.2Related language varieties of the same period and geographical area
  • 3.The Corpus of Historical Low German
    • 3.1Middle Low German
    • 3.2Purpose of the corpus
    • 3.3Corpus design
  • 4.Methodology
    • 4.1Tagset
    • 4.2Standard experimental set-up
    • 4.3Experimental data
  • 5.Results and discussion
    • 5.1In-domain experiments
    • 5.2Cross-city robustness
    • 5.3Feature informativeness
    • 5.4Cross-genre robustness
    • 5.5Error analysis
  • 6.Improving tagging accuracy: The impact of spelling normalization and morphological information
    • 6.1Corpus subset and baseline
    • 6.2The effects of normalization on tagging accuracy
    • 6.3The effects of morphological information on POS tagging
  • 7.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References


This article is currently available as a sample article.

Published online: 28 July 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22.1.05kol
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