arXiv subjects

Beatrice Santorini

Publications and source records attributed to Beatrice Santorini.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2023

A Part-of-Speech Tagger for Yiddish

We describe the construction and evaluation of a part-of-speech tagger for Yiddish. This is the first step in a larger project of automatically assigning part-of-speech tags and syntactic structure to Yiddish text for purposes of linguistic research. We combine two resources for the current work - an 80K-word subset of the Penn Parsed Corpus of Historical Yiddish (PPCHY) and 650 million words of OCR'd Yiddish text from the Yiddish Book Center (YBC). Yiddish orthography in the YBC corpus has many spelling inconsistencies, and we present some evidence that even simple non-contextualized embeddings trained on YBC are able to capture the relationships among spelling variants without the need to first "standardize" the corpus. We also use YBC for continued pretraining of contexualized embeddings, which are then integrated into a tagger model trained and evaluated on the PPCHY. We evaluate the tagger performance on a 10-fold cross-validation split, showing that the use of the YBC text for the contextualized embeddings improves tagger performance. We conclude by discussing some next steps, including the need for additional annotated training and test data.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English: First Parsing Results and Analysis

We present the first parsing results on the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English (PPCEME), a 1.9 million word treebank that is an important resource for research in syntactic change. We describe key features of PPCEME that make it challenging for parsing, including a larger and more varied set of function tags than in the Penn Treebank. We present results for this corpus using a modified version of the Berkeley Neural Parser and the approach to function tag recovery of Gabbard et al (2006). Despite its simplicity, this approach works surprisingly well, suggesting it is possible to recover the original structure with sufficient accuracy to support linguistic applications (e.g., searching for syntactic structures of interest). However, for a subset of function tags (e.g., the tag indicating direct speech), additional work is needed, and we discuss some further limits of this approach. The resulting parser will be used to parse Early English Books Online, a 1.1 billion word corpus whose utility for the study of syntactic change will be greatly increased with the addition of accurate parse trees.

cs.CL↗

arXiv1994

Adnominal adjectives, code-switching and lexicalized TAG

In codeswitching contexts, the language of a syntactic head determines the distribution of its complements. Mahootian 1993 derives this generalization by representing heads as the anchors of elementary trees in a lexicalized TAG. However, not all codeswitching sequences are amenable to a head-complement analysis. For instance, adnominal adjectives can occupy positions not available to them in their own language, and the TAG derivation of such sequences must use unanchored auxiliary trees. palabras heavy-duty `heavy-duty words' (Spanish-English; Poplack 1980:584) taste lousy sana `very lousy taste' (English-Swahili; Myers-Scotton 1993:29, (10)) Given the null hypothesis that codeswitching and monolingual sequences are derived in an identical manner, sequences like those above provide evidence that pure lexicalized TAGs are inadequate for the description of natural language.

cmp-lg↗