This paper deals with the development of morphosyntactic taggers for spoken varieties of the Slavic minority language Rusyn. As neither annotated corpora nor parallel corpora are electronically available for Rusyn, we propose to combine existing resources from the etymologically close Slavic languages Russian, Ukrainian, Slovak, and Polish and adapt them to Rusyn. Using MarMoT as tagging toolkit, we show that a tagger trained on a balanced set of the four source languages outperforms single language taggers by about 9%, and that additional automatically induced morphosyntactic lexicons lead to further improvements. The best observed accuracies for Rusyn are 82.4% for part-of-speech tagging and 75.5% for full morphological tagging.

This paper reports on challenges and results in developing NLP resources for spoken Rusyn. Being a Slavic minority language, Rusyn does not have any resources to make use of. We propose to build a morphosyntactic dictionary for Rusyn, combining existing resources from the etymologically close Slavic languages Russian, Ukrainian, Slovak, and Polish. We adapt these resources to Rusyn by using vowel-sensitive Levenshtein distance, hand-written language-specific transformation rules, and combinations of the two. Compared to an exact match baseline, we increase the coverage of the resulting morphological dictionary by up to 77.4% relative (42.9% absolute), which results in a tagging recall increased by 11.6% relative (9.1% absolute). Our research confirms and expands the results of previous studies showing the efficiency of using NLP resources from neighboring languages for low-resourced languages.