Abstract
The paper describes a tagger for Old Czech (1200-1500 AD), a fusional language with rich morphology. The practical restrictions (no native speakers, limited corpora and lexicons, limited funding) make Old Czech an ideal candidate for a resource-light cross-lingual method that we have been developing (e.g.
Hana et al., 2004; Feldman and Hana, 2010). We use a traditional supervised tagger.
However, instead of spending years of effort to create a large annotated corpus of Old Czech, we approximate it by a corpus of Modern Czech. We perform a series of simple transformations to make a modern text look more like a text in Old Czech and vice versa.
We also use a resource-light morphological analyzer to provide candidate tags. The results are worse than the results of traditional taggers, but the amount of language-specific work needed is minimal.