The first annotated corpus of historical Basque

• Published in: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities Vol. 37; no. 2; pp. 391 - 404
• Main Authors: Estarrona, Ainara, Etxeberria, Izaskun, Soraluze, Ander, Etxepare, Ricardo, Padilla-Moyano, Manuel
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University Press 25-05-2022
• Subjects: Humanities and Social Sciences; natural language processing (NLP); history of Basque; historical corpora; diachronic syntax; digital humanities
• ISSN: 2055-7671; 2055-768X
• DOI: 10.1093/llc/fqab066

Abstract
This article presents the elaboration of a morphosyntactically annotated diachronic corpus of Basque, and the first results obtained in the processing of historical varieties of this language with computational techniques. The corpus size is around one million words, expanding from the 15th to the mid-18th century and encompassing the most significant written production in all historical dialects. Morphosyntactic tagging allows for systematic searches at different levels of complexity; additionally, a rich set of metadata enables searches based on sociohistorical criteria too. This is not only the first tagged corpus of historical Basque but also a means to improve language processing tools by analyzing historical varieties more or less distant from the present-day standard language. Moreover, this project aims to set a model for further works in the historical corpora of Basque and inform similar projects on other languages.