Annotation of Czech texts with language mixing

Abstract

Language mixing (using chunks of foreign language in a native language utterance) occurs frequently. Foreign language chunks have to be detected because their annotation is often incorrect. In the standard pipelines of Czech texts annotation, no such detection exists. Before morphological disambiguation, unrecognized words are processed by Czech guesser which is successful on Czech words (e.g. neologisms, typos) but its usage makes no sense on foreign words. We propose a new pipeline that adds foreign language chunk and multi-word expression (MWE) detection. We experimented with a small corpus where we compared the original (semi-automatic) annotation (including foreign words and MWEs) with the results of the new pipelines. As a result, we reduced the number of incorrect annotations of interlingual homographs and foreign language chunks in the new pipeline compared to the standard one. We also reduced the number of tokens that have to be processed by the guesser. The aim was to use the guesser solely on potentially Czech words.