Correcting Errors in a New Gold Standard for Tagging Icelandic Text

In this paper, we describe the correction of PoS tags in a new Icelandic corpus, MIM-GOLD, consisting of about 1 million tokens sampled from the Tagged Icelandic Corpus, MÍM, released in 2013. The goal is to use the corpus, among other things, as a new gold standard for training and testing PoS taggers. The construction of the corpus was first described in 2010 together with preliminary work on error detection and correction. In this paper, we describe further the correction of tags in the corpus. We describe manual correction and a method for semi-automatic error detection and correction. We show that, even after manual correction, the number of tagging errors in the corpus can be reduced significantly by applying our semi-automatic detection and correction method. After the semi-automatic error correction, preliminary evaluation of tagging accuracy shows very low error rates. We hope that the existence of the corpus will make it possible to improve PoS taggers for Icelandic text.