Improving part-of-speech tagging of historical text by first translating to modern text

Abstract

We explore the task of automatically assigning syntactic tags (known as part-of-speech tags) like Noun and Verb to words in seventeenth-century Dutch text. Tools exist for performing this task for modern texts but they perform poorly on historical texts because of language changes. We test several methods for translating the words in the historical text to modern equivalents before applying the tag assignment tools. We show that this additional translation step improves the quality of the automatic syntactic analysis. Further improvements are possible when the lexicons and text collections used for developing the translation process, are extended in size.