Standardizing linguistic data: method and tools for annotating (pre-orthographic) French
This work is significant for historical linguists and computational linguists working with diachronic French corpora, as it improves data interoperability and consistency for a specific historical period.
The paper addresses the challenge of standardizing linguistic annotation for large corpora of early modern French (16-18th c.). It proposes annotation principles and develops a linguistic tagger, aiming to enhance data interoperability by aligning with existing standards for contemporary and medieval French.
With the development of big corpora of various periods, it becomes crucial to standardise linguistic annotation (e.g. lemmas, POS tags, morphological annotation) to increase the interoperability of the data produced, despite diachronic variations. In the present paper, we describe both methodologically (by proposing annotation principles) and technically (by creating the required training data and the relevant models) the production of a linguistic tagger for (early) modern French (16-18th c.), taking as much as possible into account already existing standards for contemporary and, especially, medieval French.