Towards a Historical Treebank of Middle and Early Modern Welsh, Part I: Workflow and POS Tagging. (1st January 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Meelen, Marieke; Willis, David
• Is Part Of: Journal of Celtic linguistics. Volume 22(2021)
• Page Start: 125
• Page End: 154
• Publication Date: 2021-01-01
• Subjects: Celtic languages -- Periodicals; Linguistics -- Great Britain -- Periodicals; Celtic languages; Linguistics; Great Britain; Periodicals; 491.6
• DOI: 10.16922/jcl.22.6
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0962-1377

Abstract

This article introduces the working methods of the Parsed Historical Corpus of the Welsh Language (PARSHCWL). The corpus is designed to provide researchers with a tool for automatic exhaustive extraction of instances of grammatical structures from Middle and Modern Welsh texts in a way comparable to similar tools that already exist for various European languages. The major features of the corpus are outlined, along with the overall architecture of the workflow needed for a team of researchers to produce it. In this paper, the two first stages of the process, namely pre-processing of texts and automated part-of-speech (POS) tagging are discussed in some detail, focusing in particular on major issues involved in defining word boundaries and in defining a robust and useful tagset.