Data-Driven Syllabification for Middle Dutch

Abstract: The task of automatically separating Middle Dutch words into syllables is a challenging one. A first method was presented by Bouma and Hermans (2012), who combined a rule-based finite-state component with data-driven error correction. Achieving an average word accuracy of 96.5%, their system surely is a satisfactory one, although it leaves room for improvement. Generally speaking, rule-based methods are less attractive for dealing with a medieval language like Middle Dutch, where not only each dialect has its own spelling preferences, but where there is also much idiosyncratic variat... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Haverals, Wouter
Karsdorp, Folgert
Kestemont, Mike
Dokumenttyp: Artikel
Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
Schlagwörter: Literature
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-27448989
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
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Link(s) : https://hdl.handle.net/10067/1649260151162165141

Abstract: The task of automatically separating Middle Dutch words into syllables is a challenging one. A first method was presented by Bouma and Hermans (2012), who combined a rule-based finite-state component with data-driven error correction. Achieving an average word accuracy of 96.5%, their system surely is a satisfactory one, although it leaves room for improvement. Generally speaking, rule-based methods are less attractive for dealing with a medieval language like Middle Dutch, where not only each dialect has its own spelling preferences, but where there is also much idiosyncratic variation among scribes. This paper presents a different method for the task of automatically syllabifying Middle Dutch words, which does not rely on a set of pre-defined linguistic information. Using a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) with Long-Short-Term Memory cells (LSTM), we obtain a system which outperforms the rule-based method both in robustness and in effort.