HiNTS: A Tagset for Middle Low German

Abstract

In this paper, we describe the “Historisches Niederdeutsch Tagset” (HiNTS). This tagset has been developed for annotating parts-of-speech and morphology in Middle Low German texts, a group of historical (1200–1650) dialects of German. A non-standardized language such as Middle Low German has special conditions and requirements which have to be considered when designing a tagset for part of speech and morphology. We explain these requirements, i.e. the need to encode ambiguities while allowing the annotator to be as specific as possible, and our approach for dealing with them in the tagset. We then describe two special features of the tagset. In order to prove the benefit of these tags and corresponding annotation rules, we present example searches and the possible analyses arising from the results of such searches. Besides the usefulness of our tagset, we also considered its reliability in annotation using inter-annotator agreement experiments. The results of these experiments are presented and explained.

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