Automatic transcription of 17th century English text in Contemporary English with NooJ: Method and Evaluation

What it is about

The paper describes a rule-based pipeline, built in the NooJ platform, that rewrites 17th-century English as Contemporary English. The output is a set of proposals that a user accepts or rejects. Five transcription classes are used: word-for-word lookup with dictionaries and morphological graphs; joining split forms (my self); contractions ('tis); syntagm-for-paradigm (whencesoever as from whatever place); and syntactic rewriting, for example soever constructions and periphrastic do. Dictionaries have priority levels, so a higher-priority entry hides a modern sense (the golf term putt is hidden). On a test set of about 9,000 word forms from travel literature, about 15% of which are archaic, the reported precision is 96.85%, recall 94.36% and F-measure 95.58%. About 11% of the correct answers were ambiguous. Proper nouns lost their capitals, and paronyms gave several candidates (sinne gave three).

Ideas

• I1. Add priority tiers to the lexicon in en/src/dict.rs, so that early-modern entries shadow modern senses (the putt case). Measure lemma accuracy on 14. Sample texts, read word by word with and without the tier, and run twice.
• I2. Use the five classes as a checklist. Assign each archaic form in the sample texts to one class and report the share per class. This shows which class of rule is missing.
• I3. Report precision, recall and F in the same way for the early-modern transcription. Add a negative control: with the transcription lexicon shuffled, the score must fall well below the real run.

For Mova

The relevant chapters are 2. Spelling, print conventions and tokens, 10. Vocabulary: archaic words and false friends and 7. Do, its absence, and negation (periphrastic do). The code is the closed table in en/src/emode.rs, morph::archaic in en/src/morph.rs, and the dictionary in en/src/dict.rs. The measure: precision, recall and F on the sample texts, with the negative control.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. arXiv 1109.4906

@misc{piton2011automatic,
  title = {{Automatic transcription of 17th century English text in Contemporary English with NooJ: Method and Evaluation}},
  author = {Piton, Odile and Mesfar, Slim and Pignot, Helene},
  year = {2011},
  eprint = {1109.4906},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4906}
}

References

9 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

1. 14Automatic Transcription of 17 th Century English in Contemporary English with NooJ Millward, C. M. 1996. A Biography of the English Language. Boston: Thomson Learning. find
2. Pignot H., Piton O. 2010. Language Processing of 17 th Century English and Creation of a Diachronic NooJ Dictionary, in Tamás Váradi, Judit Kuti and Max Silberztein eds., Applications of Finite-State Language Processing -- Selected Papers from the 2008 International NooJ Conference. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 197-210. find
3. Piton, O., Pignot, H. 2009. “Étude d’un corpus de textes de voyageurs anglais du 17 e siècle, et aide à la transcription en anglais moderne”. 6 èmes JLC, Lorient. < http://www.licorn-ubs.com/jlc6.html> ↗
4. Pignot, H., Piton, O. 2011. Mary Astell’s Words in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies (part I), a Lexicographic Inquiry with NooJ, Proceedings of the 2010 NooJ Conference, Komotini, 232-44. find
5. Scragg, D.G. 1974. A History of English Spelling. Manchester: MUP.Silberztein, M. 2005. “NooJ's dictionaries”, Proceedings of the 2nd Language & Technology Conference, April 21-23, 2005, Poznán, Poland, Zygmunt Vetulani (ed.). find
6. Silberztein, M. 2006. “NooJ’s Linguistic Annotation Engine”. In: Koeva, S., Maurel D., Silberztein M. (eds), INTEX/NooJ pour le Traitement Automatique des Langues. Cahiers de la MSH Ledoux. Presses Universitaires de Franche-Comté. 9-26. find
7. Silberztein, M. 2007. “An Alternative Approach to Tagging”. Invited paper. In: Proceedings of NLDB 2007. LNCS series. Berlin: Springer. 1-11. find
8. Silberztein M. 2007. Complex Annotations with NooJ. In 2007 International NooJ Conference. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 214-227. Silberztein, M. NooJ manual. <http://www.nooj4nlp.net/pages/references.html>. ↗
9. Visser, F. Th. 1963-73. An Historical Syntax of the English Language. Leiden: Brill. find

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