Tracing Syntactic Change in the Scientific Genre: Two Universal Dependency-parsed Diachronic Corpora of Scientific English and German

What it is about

The authors build two comparable UD-parsed diachronic corpora of scientific writing from the 17th to 19th centuries, English (RSC) and German (DTAW). Before parsing they normalize the text (for example, slashes replaced by commas) and keep only "good sentences", selected by rules that catch title-like fragments and other non-sentences. The parser is UDPipe 1 with the GUM model for English and GSD for German. On 100 sampled sentences per corpus, every retained sentence is parsable, and label and head accuracy per token is above 80 percent for both languages, with the pre-processing shown to raise quality. A case study of noun phrases then finds the trend towards heavier noun phrases and simpler clause structure that the literature reports for English scientific prose, and the same trend in German.

Ideas

• I1. Good-sentence filter in Rust before en parsing of historical English: rules that reject title-like fragments and unterminated text; measure parsability on 100 sentences sampled per period, as the paper does, without training on them.
• I2. Period-wise accuracy: run en on a 17th to 19th century sample, report UAS and LAS per 50-year period, and compare with EWT dev; the paper's flat accuracy across periods is the check that the sample is usable.
• I3. Noun-phrase depth by period: count pre- and post-modifiers per noun phrase in the parsed output with the prag and world readings, as a register measure for 37. Register and variation, reported as a measure and not as a claim about the language.

For Mova

The parser for this is en/src/parse.rs (with en/src/ud.rs for the tags) and the filter would sit in annot or the corpus tools. The chapters are 09. Early Modern and archaic forms and 37. Register and variation. Measure first the parsability of the filtered sentences on a 100-sentence sample per period.

Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.22028/d291-37888

@inproceedings{krielke2022tracing,
  title = {{Tracing Syntactic Change in the Scientific Genre: Two Universal Dependency-parsed Diachronic Corpora of Scientific English and German}},
  author = {Krielke, Marie-Pauline and Talamo, Luigi and Fawzi, Mahmoud and Knappen, Jörg},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference},
  year = {2022},
  doi = {10.22028/d291-37888},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.22028/d291-37888}
}

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