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POS-tagging of Historical Dutch

We present a study of the adequacy of current methods that are used for POS-tagging historical Dutch texts, as well as an exploration of the influence of employing different techniques to improve upon the current practice. The main focus of this paper is on (unsupervised) methods that are easily adaptable for different domains without requiring extensive manual input. It was found that modernising the spelling of corpora prior to tagging them with a tagger trained on contemporary Dutch results in a large increase in accuracy, but that spelling normalisation alone is not sufficient to obtain state-of-the-art results. The best results were achieved by training a POS-tagger on a corpus automatically annotated by projecting (automatically assigned) POS-tags via word alignments from a contemporary corpus. This result is promising, as it was reached without including any domain knowledge or context dependencies. We argue that the insights of this study combined with semi-supervised learning techniques for domain adaptation can be used to develop a general-purpose diachronic tagger for Dutch.