The quantity of Old Irish text which survives in contemporary manuscripts is relatively small by comparison to what is available for well-resourced modern languages. Moreover, as it is a historical language, no more text will ever be generated by native speakers of Old Irish. This makes the text which has survived particularly valuable, and ideally, all of it would be annotated using a single, common annotation standard, thereby ensuring compatibility between text resources. At present, Old Irish text repositories separate words or sub-word morphemes in accordance with different methodologies, and each uses a different style of lexical annotation. This makes it difficult to utilise content from more than any one repository in NLP applications. This paper provides an assessment of distinctions between existing annotated corpora, showing that the primary point of divergence is at the token level. For this reason, this paper also describes a new method for tokenising Old Irish text. This method can be applied even to diplomatic editions, and has already been utilised in various text resources.

The quantity and variety of Old Irish text which survives in contemporary manuscripts, those dating from the Old Irish period, is quite small by comparison to what is available for Modern Irish, not to mention better-resourced modern languages. As no native speakers have existed for more than a millennium, no more text will ever be created by native speakers. For these reasons, text surviving in contemporary sources is particularly valuable. Ideally, all such text would be annotated using a single, common standard to ensure compatibility. At present, discrete Old Irish text repositories make use of incompatible annotation styles, few of which are utilised by text resources for other languages. This limits the potential for using text from more than any one resource simultaneously in NLP applications, or as a basis for creating further resources. This paper describes the production of the first Old Irish text resources to be designed specifically to ensure lexical compatibility and interoperability.

Corpus data is the main source of data for natural language processing applications, however no standard or model for corpus data has become predominant in the field. Linguistic linked data aims to provide methods by which data can be made findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable (FAIR). However, current attempts to create a linked data format for corpora have been unsuccessful due to the verbose and specialised formats that they use. In this work, we present the Teanga data model, which uses a layered annotation model to capture all NLP-relevant annotations. We present the YAML serializations of the model, which is concise and uses a widely-deployed format, and we describe how this can be interpreted as RDF. Finally, we demonstrate three examples of the use of the Teanga data model for syntactic annotation, literary analysis and multilingual corpora.

POS-tagging is typically considered a fundamental text preprocessing task, with a variety of downstream NLP tasks and techniques being dependent on the availability of POS-tagged corpora. As such, POS-taggers are important precursors to further NLP tasks, and their accuracy can impact the potential accuracy of these dependent tasks. While a variety of POS-tagging methods have been developed which work well with modern languages, historical languages present orthographic and editorial challenges which require special attention. The effectiveness of POS-taggers developed for modern languages is reduced when applied to Old Irish, with its comparatively complex orthography and morphology. This paper examines some of the obstacles to POS-tagging Old Irish text, and shows that inconsistencies between extant annotated corpora reduce the quantity of data available for use in training POS-taggers. The development of a multi-layer neural network model for POS-tagging Old Irish text is described, and an experiment is detailed which demonstrates that this model outperforms a variety of off-the-shelf POS-taggers. Moreover, this model sets a new benchmark for POS-tagging diplomatically edited Old Irish text.

This paper discusses the organisation and findings of the SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task on Word Embedding Evaluation for Ancient and Historical Languages. The shared task was split into the constrained and unconstrained tracks and involved solving either 3 or 5 problems for either 13 or 16 ancient and historical languages belonging to 4 language families, and making use of 6 different scripts. There were 14 registrations in total, of which 3 teams submitted to each track. Out of these 6 submissions, 2 systems were successful in the constrained setting and another 2 in the uncon- strained setting, and 4 system description papers were submitted by different teams. The best average result for morphological feature prediction was about 96%, while the best average results for POS-tagging and lemmatisation were 96% and 94% respectively. At the word level, the winning team could not achieve a higher average accuracy across all 16 languages than 5.95%, which demonstrates the difficulty of this problem. At the character level, the best average result over 16 languages 55.62%

This paper describes the structure and findings of the SIGTYP 2023 shared task on cognate and derivative detection for low-resourced languages, broken down into a supervised and unsupervised sub-task. The participants were asked to submit the test data’s final prediction. A total of nine teams registered for the shared task where seven teams registered for both sub-tasks. Only two participants ended up submitting system descriptions, with only one submitting systems for both sub-tasks. While all systems show a rather promising performance, all could be within the baseline score for the supervised sub-task. However, the system submitted for the unsupervised sub-task outperforms the baseline score.