An HMM-Based PoS Tagger for Old Church Slavonic

We present a hybrid HMM-based PoS tagger for Old Church Slavonic. The training corpus is a portion of one text, Codex Marianus (40k) annotated with the Universal Dependencies UPOS tags in the UD-PROIEL treebank. We perform a number of experiments in within-domain and out-of-domain settings, in which the remaining part of Codex Marianus serves as a within-domain test set, and Kiev Folia is used as an out-of-domain test set. Analysing by-PoS-class precision and sensitivity in each run, we combine a simple context-free n-gram-based approach and Hidden Markov method (HMM), and added linguistic rules for specific cases such as punctuation and digits. While the model achieves a rather non-impressive accuracy of 81% in in-domain settings, we observe an accuracy of 51% in out-of-domain evaluation, which is comparable to the results of large neural architectures based on pre-trained contextual embeddings.