Building open access, calibrated, syntactically annotated corpora over the history of French: A Case study of the application and adaptation of annotation tools for historical syntax

Abstract

This case study presents challenges and solutions for building calibrated syntactically annotated diachronic corpora of French. Through a series of integrated projects that developed methods for syntactic annotation of medium and large collections of non-literary texts over a long period of time (13th – 19th centuries), we consider how the availability of tools and the emergence of research questions shape and direct corpus-building activity. Supported by the experience of an earlier project, a semi-automated workflow for syntactic annotation was developed to allow processing of two corpora calibrated by provenance and genre, with a focus on parts-of-speech tagging in three annotation frameworks. The workflow combines the use of a neural dependency parser, a lexicon of lemmata and forms and a Python library. This experience, in turn, gave rise to a new initiative that aimed at formulating and testing best practices for creating syntactically annotated treebanks for different periods of the history of the language.