For many of the world’s small languages, few resources are available. In this project, a written online accessible corpus was created for the minority language variant Gronings, which serves both researchers interested in language change and variation and a general audience of (new) speakers interested in finding real-life examples of language use. The corpus was created using a combination of volunteer work and automation, which together formed an efficient pipeline for converting printed text to Key Words in Context (KWICs), annotated with lemmas and part-of-speech tags. In the creation of the corpus, we have taken into account several of the challenges that can occur when creating resources for minority languages, such as a lack of standardisation and limited (financial) resources. As the solutions we offer are applicable to other small languages as well, each step of the corpus creation process is discussed and resources will be made available benefiting future projects on other low-resource languages.

We present a lemmatizer/PoS tagger/dependency parser for West Frisian using a corpus of 44,714 words in 3,126 sentences that were annotated according to the guidelines of Universal Dependencies version 2. PoS tags were assigned to words by using a Dutch PoS tagger that was applied to a Dutch word-by-word translation, or to sentences of a Dutch parallel text. Best results were obtained when using word-by-word translations that were created by using the previous version of the Frisian translation program Oersetter. Morphologic and syntactic annotations were generated on the basis of a Dutch word-by-word translation as well. The performance of the lemmatizer/tagger/annotator when it was trained using default parameters was compared to the performance that was obtained when using the parameter values that were used for training the LassySmall UD 2.5 corpus. We study the effects of different hyperparameter settings on the accuracy of the annotation pipeline. The Frisian lemmatizer/PoS tagger/dependency parser is released as a web app and as a web service.