Diachronic Parsing of Pre-Standard Irish
Published in Proceedings of the 4th Celtic Language Technology Workshop, 2022
Recommended citation: Kevin P. Scannell. Diachronic Parsing of Pre-Standard Irish. In Proceedings of the 4th Celtic Language Technology Workshop at LREC 2022, pages 7–13, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association. https://kevinscannell.com/files/dppsi.pdf
Workshop held at LREC 2022 in Marseille, France.
Abstract: Irish underwent a major spelling standardization in the 1940’s and 1950’s, and as a result it can be challenging to apply language technologies designed for the modern language to older, “pre-standard” texts. Lemmatization, tagging, and parsing of these pre-standard texts play an important role in a number of applications, including the lexicographical work on Foclóir Stairiúil na Gaeilge, a historical dictionary of Irish covering the period from 1600 to the present. We have two main goals in this paper. First, we introduce a small benchmark corpus containing just over 3800 tokens, annotated according to the Universal Dependencies guidelines and covering a range of dialects and time periods since 1600. Second, we establish baselines for lemmatization, tagging, and dependency parsing on this corpus by experimenting with a variety of machine learning approaches.