Abstract
We describe experiments with morphosyntactic tagging of Old Icelandic (Old Norse) narrative texts using different tagging models for the TnT tagger [3] and a tagset of almost 700 tags, originally developed for Modern Icelandic. It is shown that by using a model that has been trained on both Old and Modern Icelandic texts, we can get 92.7% tagging accuracy which is considerably better than the 90.4% that have been reported for Modern Icelandic. Although our tagging is morphological in nature, the tags carry a substantial amount of syntactic information and the tagging is detailed enough for the syntactic function of words to be more or less deduced from their morphology and the adjacent words. We show that the morphosyntactic tags can be very useful in locating certain syntactic constructions and features in a large corpus of Old Icelandic narrative texts. We demonstrate this by searching for—and finding—previously undiscovered examples of a number of syntactic constructions in the corpus.We conclude that in a highly inflectional language, a morphologically tagged corpus can be an important tool in studying syntactic variation and change, in the absence of a fully parsed corpus which of course gives more possibilities.
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Acknowledgements
This project was partly supported by grants from the University of Iceland Research Fund to the projects “The syntactic use of Old Icelandic POS tagged texts” and “Icelandic Diachronic Treebank” and by a grant from the Icelandic Research Fund to the project “Viable Language Technology Beyond English”. Thanks to the Text Laboratory at the University of Oslo for giving us access to the Glossa system and especially to Anders Nøklestad for valuable assistance. Thanks are also due to three anonymous reviewers who made many valuable comments on a previous version of this paper.
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Rögnvaldsson, E., Helgadóttir, S. (2011). Morphosyntactic Tagging of Old Icelandic Texts and Its Use in Studying Syntactic Variation and Change. In: Sporleder, C., van den Bosch, A., Zervanou, K. (eds) Language Technology for Cultural Heritage. Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20227-8_4
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