ICTL Lecture Series - Joel Wallenberg - The Linguistic Utility of Tagging Icelandic

The Icelandic Center for Language Technology (ICTL) would like to invite you to attend a lecture by Joel Wallenberg, University of Pennsylvania, entitled "The Linguistic Utility of Tagging Icelandic".

The lecture will be given at Monday 24th of November at 12.00-13.00 in Room 201 in Árnagarði at The University of Iceland.

The methods for part-of-speech tagging Icelandic have gone through considerable advances in recent years, and have yielded results that are not only interesting for language technology, but also for linguistic theory (see for example, Helgadóttir 2004, Loftsson 2007a,b, Rögnvaldsson & Helgadóttir 2008).  This talk follows up on this work with the following two goals.  First, I will describe some recent work adapting the current state-of-the-art pos-tagger for English to Icelandic (a "bidirectional sequence classification" tagger; cf. Shen, Satta, & Joshi 2007), and some modifications we made to the tagger to help it address the tagging of case distinctions in Icelandic (Dredze & Wallenberg 2007a,b).

The second part of the talk focusses on the reason for my own interest in part-of-speech tagging, which is the construction of parsed corpora for linguistic research.  I will briefly describe one result from some recent work of mine on "Quantifier Movement" in Middle and Early Modern English (Light & Wallenberg 2008).  This construction could not have been studied in historical English without the help of, first, parsed corpora, and second, earlier careful studies of modern Icelandic (Rögnvaldsson 1987, Jónsson 1996, Svenonius 2000).