Diachronic Parsing of Pre-Standard Irish

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 words, 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.

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