The CLIN27 Shared Task: Translating Historical Text to Contemporary Language for Improving Automatic Linguistic Annotation

Abstract

The CLIN27 shared task evaluates the effect of translating historical text to modern text with the goal of improving the quality of the output of contemporary natural language processing tools applied to the text. We focus on improving part-of-speech tagging analysis of seventeenth-century Dutch. Eight teams took part in the shared task. The best results were obtained by teams employing character-based machine translation. The best system obtained an error reduction of 51% in comparison with the baseline of tagging unmodified text. This is close to the error reduction obtained by human translation (57%).