Automated processing of historical texts often relies on pre-normalization to modern word forms. Training encoder-decoder architectures to solve such problems typically requires a lot of training data, which is not available for the named task. We address this problem by using several novel encoder-decoder architectures, including a multi-task learning (MTL) architecture using a grapheme-to-phoneme dictionary as auxiliary data, pushing the state-of-theart by an absolute 2% increase in performance. We analyze the induced models across 44 different texts from Early New High German. Interestingly, we observe that, as previously conjectured, multi-task learning can learn to focus attention during decoding, in ways remarkably similar to recently proposed attention mechanisms. This, we believe, is an important step toward understanding how MTL works.
There is no consensus on the state-of-theart approach to historical text normalization. Many techniques have been proposed, including rule-based methods, distance metrics, character-based statistical machine translation, and neural encoder-decoder models, but studies have used different datasets, different evaluation methods, and have come to different conclusions. This paper presents the largest study of historical text normalization done so far. We critically survey the existing literature and report experiments on eight languages, comparing systems spanning all categories of proposed normalization techniques, analysing the effect of training data quantity, and using different evaluation methods. The datasets and scripts are made publicly available.
We present CorA, a web-based annotation tool for manual annotation of historical and other non-standard language data. It allows for editing the primary data and modifying token boundaries during the annotation process. Further, it supports immediate retraining of taggers on newly annotated data.
Historical text normalization suffers from small datasets that exhibit high variance, and previous work has shown that multitask learning can be used to leverage data from related problems in order to obtain more robust models. Previous work has been limited to datasets from a specific language and a specific historical period, and it is not clear whether results generalize. It therefore remains an open problem, when historical text normalization benefits from multi-task learning. We explore the benefits of multi-task learning across 10 different datasets, representing different languages and periods. Our main findingcontrary to what has been observed for other NLP tasks-is that multi-task learning mainly works when target task data is very scarce.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.