New wine in old wineskins?—Tagging Old Russian via annotation projection from modern translations

Abstract

The task of automatically annotating a digitised historical corpus of Russian with morphosyntactic information poses specific problems: Machine-readable resources are lacking, and word forms occur in orthographic and morphological variants and change over time. However challenging these issues are, an important advantage is that we are still dealing with a language that is predictably close to its modern variant, with its rather rich computational resources. Moreover, high-quality modern Russian translations exist for many relevant texts. The present paper demonstrates an experimental approach to the tagging of Old East Slavonic texts which uses available tools to annotate the modern version and then projects part of the annotation back onto the corresponding original forms in a careful way. The goal is to maximally alleviate the task of manual post-processing, and at the same time, to avoid ‘bursting the old wineskins’.