Enriching Interlinear Text using Automatically Constructed Annotators

In this paper, we will demonstrate a system that shows great promise for creating Part-of-Speech taggers for languages with little to no curated resources available, and which needs no expert involvement. Interlinear Glossed Text (IGT) is a resource which is available for over 1,000 languages as part of the Online Database of INterlinear text (ODIN) (Lewis and Xia, 2010). Using nothing more than IGT from this database and a classification-based projection approach tailored for IGT, we will show that it is feasible to train reasonably performing annotators of interlinear text using projected annotations for potentially hundreds of world’s languages. Doing so can facilitate automatic enrichment of interlinear resources to aid the field of linguistics.