Constructing a Parsed Corpus of Historical Portuguese[1]

Constructing a Parsed Corpus of Historical
PortugueseThis research has been developed with the support of
the FAPESP (grants #98/3382-1 and #98/12075-3).

Helena
Britto
Inst. Estudos da Linguagem (IEL) Univ.
Estadual Campinas (UNICAMP)
molina@server.nib.unicamp.br

Marcelo
Finger
Inst. Estudos da Linguagem (IEL) Univ.
Estadual Campinas (UNICAMP)
molina@server.nib.unicamp.br

1999

University of Virginia

Charlottesville, VA

ACH/ALLC 1999

editor

encoder

Sara
A.
Schmidt

The Tycho Brahe Parsed Corpus of Historical Portuguese <> consists of an electronically
annotated corpus of Portuguese texts whose authors were native speakers of
European Portuguese born between 1550 and 1850. Its construction follows the
model of the Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English <>. Only texts from editions
revised by the own authors or autographed manuscripts are included on the
corpus, each one of them containing at least fifty thousand (50,000) words,
presented electronically in three different ways: orthographically transcript,
morphologically tagged, and syntactically annotated.
The Tycho Brahe annotation system is split into three levels: extra-linguistic
material codification; morphological tagging; and a syntactic annotated system.
The extra-linguistic coding system encapsulates information such as text
edition, editor's or researcher's comments, original page number of the texts,
etc.
The tag set that compounds the morphological annotation system was the result of
a detailed research about morphosyntactic properties of Portuguese (Britto et
al. 1999). In this system, tags have internal structure, and are basically
formed from the following components: part-of-speech component, inflectional
components, and diacritics. Proposed by Finger (1998), the structuring of tags
in a part-of-speech basis and inflectional components allows for the capturing
of the morphological richness Portuguese exhibits without increasing the number
of tags involved.
Keeping the number of POS basic tags low has shown to be crucial to decrease the
computational complexity of training the automated morphological tagger for
Portuguese, which was developed in the lines of Brill's (1995) tagging method. A
tagging editor has also been implemented (TAT: Tagging Aid Tool), to help the
manual tagging of a set of Portuguese texts (Augusto et al. 1998), necessary for
training the tagger. Both the tagger and TAT run under Windows (95/98/NT) with
16MB RAM; the tagger also runs under Unix.

M.
AUGUSTO
et al
Morphological tagging for different periods of
Portuguese prose

ms.

Campinas, Brasil
Unicamp
1998

E.
BRILL

Transformation-Based Error-Driven Learning and Natural
Language Processing: A Case Study in Part of Speech Tagging

Computational Linguistics

21
4
543-565
1995

H.
BRITTO
et al
Morphological Annotation System for Automatic Tagging
of Electronic Textual Corpora: from English to Romance
Languages

Proceeding of the 6th International Symposium of Social
Communication

Santiago, Cuba

1999
582-589

M.
FINGER

Tagging a Morphologically Rich Language

Proceeding of the first Workshop on Text, Speech and
Dialogue (TSD'98)

Brno, Czech Republic

1998
39-44