Nunc profana tractemus. Detecting Code-Switching in a Large Corpus of 16th Century Letters

Martin Volk, Lukas Fischer, Patricia Scheurer, Bernard Silvan Schroffenegger, Raphael Schwitter, Phillip Ströbel, Benjamin Suter

Abstract
This paper is based on a collection of 16th century letters from and to the Zurich reformer Heinrich Bullinger. Around 12,000 letters of this exchange have been preserved, out of which 3100 have been professionally edited, and another 5500 are available as provisional transcriptions. We have investigated code-switching in these 8600 letters, first on the sentence-level and then on the word-level. In this paper we give an overview of the corpus and its language mix (mostly Early New High German and Latin, but also French, Greek, Italian and Hebrew). We report on our experiences with a popular language identifier and present our results when training an alternative identifier on a very small training corpus of only 150 sentences per language. We use the automatically labeled sentences in order to bootstrap a word-based language classifier which works with high accuracy. Our research around the corpus building and annotation involves automatic handwritten text recognition, text normalisation for ENH German, and machine translation from medieval Latin into modern German.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.311
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
2901–2908
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.311
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Martin Volk, Lukas Fischer, Patricia Scheurer, Bernard Silvan Schroffenegger, Raphael Schwitter, Phillip Ströbel, and Benjamin Suter. 2022. Nunc profana tractemus. Detecting Code-Switching in a Large Corpus of 16th Century Letters. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 2901–2908, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
Nunc profana tractemus. Detecting Code-Switching in a Large Corpus of 16th Century Letters (Volk et al., LREC 2022)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2022.lrec-1.311.pdf
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