In this paper, we investigate unsupervised and semi-supervised methods for part-of-speech (PoS) tagging in the context of historical German text. We locate our research in the context of Digital Humanities where the non-canonical nature of text causes issues facing an Natural Language Processing world in which tools are mainly trained on standard data. Data deviating from the norm requires tools adjusted to this data. We explore to which extend the availability of such training material and resources related to it influences the accuracy of PoS tagging. We investigate a variety of algorithms including neural nets, conditional random fields and self-learning techniques in order to find the best-fitted approach to tackle data sparsity. Although methods using resources from related languages outperform weakly supervised methods using just a few training examples, we can still reach a promising accuracy with methods abstaining additional resources.
@InProceedings{SCHULZ16.1237,
author = {Sarah Schulz and Jonas Kuhn}, title = {Learning from Within? Comparing PoS Tagging Approaches for Historical Text}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2016)}, year = {2016}, month = {may}, date = {23-28}, location = {Portorož, Slovenia}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Marko Grobelnik and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Helene Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, address = {Paris, France}, isbn = {978-2-9517408-9-1}, language = {english} }
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