The digitisation of historical texts has provided new horizons for NLP research, but such data also presents a set of challenges, including scarcity and inconsistency. The lack of editorial standard during digitisation exacerbates these difficulties.This study explores the potential for temporal domain adaptation in Early Modern Irish and pre-reform Modern Irish data. We describe two experiments carried out on the book subcorpus of the Historical Irish Corpus, which includes Early Modern Irish and pre-reform Modern Irish texts from 1581 to 1926. We also propose a simple orthographic normalisation method for historical Irish that reduces the type-token ratio by 21.43% on average in our data.The results demonstrate that the use of out-of-domain data significantly improves a language model’s performance. Providing a model with additional input from another historical stage of the language improves its quality by 12.49% on average on non-normalised texts and by 27.02% on average on normalised (demutated) texts. Most notably, using only out-of-domain data for both pre-training and training stages allowed for up to 86.81% of the baseline model quality on non-normalised texts and up to 95.68% on normalised texts without any target domain data. Additionally, we investigate the effect of temporal distance between the training and test data. The hypothesis that there is a positive correlation between performance and temporal proximity of training and test data has been validated, which manifests best in normalised data. Expanding this approach even further back, to Middle and Old Irish, and testing it on other languages is a further research direction.
Aligning senses across resources and languages is a challenging task with beneficial applications in the field of natural language processing and electronic lexicography. In this paper, we describe our efforts in manually aligning monolingual dictionaries. The alignment is carried out at sense-level for various resources in 15 languages. Moreover, senses are annotated with possible semantic relationships such as broadness, narrowness, relatedness, and equivalence. In comparison to previous datasets for this task, this dataset covers a wide range of languages and resources and focuses on the more challenging task of linking general-purpose language. We believe that our data will pave the way for further advances in alignment and evaluation of word senses by creating new solutions, particularly those notoriously requiring data such as neural networks. Our resources are publicly available at https://github.com/elexis-eu/MWSA.