Advances in the automatic lemmatization of Old English: class V strong verbs (L-Y)

Abstract

The grammatical description of Old English lacks complete and systematic lemmatization, which hinders Natural Language Processing studies in this language, as they strongly rely on the existence of large, annotated corpora. Moreover, the inflectional features of Old English preclude token-based automatic lemmatization. Therefore, specifically goal-oriented applications must be developed to account for the automatic lemmatization of specific variable categories. This article designs an automatic lemmatizer within the framework of Morphological Generation to address the type-based lemmatization of Old English class V strong verbs (L-Y). The lemmatizer is implemented with rules that account for inflectional, derivational and morphophonological variation. The generated forms are compared with the most relevant corpora of Old English for validation before being assigned a lemma. The lemmatizer is successful in supplying form-lemma associations not yet accounted for in the literature, and in identifying mismatches and areas for manual revision.