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Building a Corpus from Handwritten Picture Postcards: Transcription, Annotation and Part-of-Speech Tagging

In this paper, we present a corpus of over 11,000 holiday picture postcards written in German and Swiss German. The postcards have been collected for the purpose of text-linguistic investigations on the genre and its standardisation and variation over time. We discuss the processes and challenges of digitalisation, manual transcription, and manual annotation. In addition, we developed our own automatic text segmentation system and a part-of-speech tagger, since our texts often contain orthographic deviations, domain-specific structures such as fragments, subject-less sentences, interjections, discourse particles, and domain-specific formulaic communicative routines in salutation and greeting. In particular, we demonstrate that the CRF-based POS tagger could be boosted to a domain-specific text by adding a small amount of in-domain data. We showed that entropy-based training data sampling was competitive with random sampling in performing this task. The evaluation showed that our POS tagger achieved a F1 score of 0.93 (precision 0.94, recall 0.93), which outperformed a state-of-the-art POS tagger.