Morphological and Part-of-Speech Tagging of Historical Language Data: A Comparison

This paper deals with morphological and part-of-speech tagging applied to manuscripts written in Middle High German. I present the results of a set of experiments that involve different levels of token normalization and dialect-specific subcorpora. As expected, tagging with “normalized”, quasi-standardized tokens performs best. Normalization improves accuracies by .–. percentage points, resulting in accuracies of > % for morphological tagging, and > % for part-of-speech tagging. Comparing Middle with New High German data of similar size, the evaluation shows that part-of-speech tagging, but not morphological tagging, is clearly easier with modern data.