God Wat Þæt Ic Eom God -- An Exploratory Investigation Into Word Sense Disambiguation in Old English

Martin Wunderlich
University of Munich (LMU)

Alexander Fraser
University of Munich (LMU)

P.S. Langeslag
University of Göttingen

Natural Language Processing (NLP) of historical languages is an
understudied area. Much previous work has focused on the problems of
normalization and POS tagging. In contrast, we consider a new problem,
word sense disambiguation (WSD). We provide a survey of previous work
on processing of historical languages and discuss what we can and
cannot apply to the problem of WSD, specifically WSD of Old English
(OE). We then annotate a new resource for supervised WSD, which we
make available. Finally, we carry out proof-of-concept experiments,
followed by a discussion of several promising areas for future work.

[The OE in the title means "God knows I'm good"]