Colin Swaelens, Ilse De Vos & Els Lefever, Medieval Social Media: Manual and Automatic Annotation of Byzantine Greek Marginal Writing

Abstract

In this paper, we present the interim results of a transformer-based annotation pipeline for Ancient and Medieval Greek. As the texts in the Database of Byzantine Book Epigrams have not been normalised, they pose more challenges for manual and automatic annotation than Ancient Greek, normalised texts do. As a result, the existing annotation tools perform poorly. We compiled three data sets for the development of an automatic annotation tool and carried out an inter-annotator agreement study, with a promising agreement score. The experimental results show that our part-of-speech tagger yields accuracy scores that are almost 50 percentage points higher than the widely used rule-based system Morpheus. In addition, error analysis revealed problems related to phenomena also occurring in current social media language.

Practical information

This paper will be presented at “The 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics” (Toronto, 9-14 July 2023). It is part of “The 17th Linguistic Annotation Workshop“.

Linguistic annotation of natural language corpora is the backbone of supervised methods of statistical natural language processing. The Linguistic Annotation Workshop (LAW) is the annual workshop of the ACL Special Interest Group on Annotation (SIGANN), and it provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of innovative research on all aspects of linguistic annotation, including the creation and evaluation of annotation schemes, methods for automatic and manual annotation, use and evaluation of annotation software and frameworks, representation of linguistic data and annotations, semi-supervised “human in the loop” methods of annotation, crowd-sourcing approaches, and more. As in the past, the LAW will provide a forum for annotation researchers to work towards standardization, best practices, and interoperability of annotation information and software.

Date & time: Thursday 13 July 2023; 09:45 am

Location: Westin Harbour Castle (1 Harbour Square, Toronto)