Improving Part-of-Speech Tagging of Historical Text by First Translating to Modern Text

E. Tjong Kim Sang

Improving Part-of-Speech Tagging of Historical Text by First Translating to Modern Text

E. Tjong Kim Sang

Meertens Institute

Research output: Contribution to conference › Paper › Scientific › peer-review

Abstract

We explore the task of automatically assigning syntactic tags (known as part-of-speech tags) like Noun and Verb to words in seventeenth-century Dutch text. Tools exist for performing this task for modern texts but they perform poorly on historical texts because of language changes. We test several methods for translating the words in the historical text to modern equivalents before applying the tag assignment tools. We show that this additional translation step improves the quality of the automatic syntactic analysis. Further improvements are possible when the lexicons and text collections used for developing the translation process, are extended in size.

Original language	English
Number of pages	11
Publication status	Published - 25 May 2016

Keywords

part-of-speech tagging
historical text
machine translation
lexicons

Access to Document

http://ifarm.nl/erikt/papers/chdh2016.pdf

1 Article

The CLIN27 Shared Task: Translating Historical Text to Contemporary Language for Improving Automatic Linguistic Annotation
Tjong Kim Sang, E., Bollman, M., Boschker, R., Casacuberta, F., Dietz, F., Dipper, S., Domingo, M., van der Goot, R., van Koppen, M., Ljubesic, N., Ostling, R., Petran, F., Pettersson, E., Scherrer, Y., Schraagen, M., Sevens, L., Tiedemann, J., Vanallemeersch, T. & Zervanou, K., 2017, In: Computational Linguistics in the Netherlands Journal. 7, p. 53-64 12 p., 88.
Research output: Contribution to journal/periodical › Article › Scientific › peer-review

Open Access

Cite this

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title = "Improving Part-of-Speech Tagging of Historical Text by First Translating to Modern Text",

abstract = "We explore the task of automatically assigning syntactic tags (known as part-of-speech tags) like Noun and Verb to words in seventeenth-century Dutch text. Tools exist for performing this task for modern texts but they perform poorly on historical texts because of language changes. We test several methods for translating the words in the historical text to modern equivalents before applying the tag assignment tools. We show that this additional translation step improves the quality of the automatic syntactic analysis. Further improvements are possible when the lexicons and text collections used for developing the translation process, are extended in size.",

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AB - We explore the task of automatically assigning syntactic tags (known as part-of-speech tags) like Noun and Verb to words in seventeenth-century Dutch text. Tools exist for performing this task for modern texts but they perform poorly on historical texts because of language changes. We test several methods for translating the words in the historical text to modern equivalents before applying the tag assignment tools. We show that this additional translation step improves the quality of the automatic syntactic analysis. Further improvements are possible when the lexicons and text collections used for developing the translation process, are extended in size.

KW - part-of-speech tagging

KW - historical text

KW - machine translation

KW - lexicons

M3 - Paper

ER -

Improving Part-of-Speech Tagging of Historical Text by First Translating to Modern Text

Abstract

Keywords

Access to Document

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Research output

The CLIN27 Shared Task: Translating Historical Text to Contemporary Language for Improving Automatic Linguistic Annotation

Cite this