By Dolf Trieschnigg, Djoerd Hiemstra, Mariët Theune, Franciska de Jong and Theo Meder
Abstract
The Dutch Folktale Database contains fairy tales, traditional legends, urban legends, and jokes written in a large variety and combination of languages including (Middle and 17th century) Dutch, Frisian and a number of Dutch dialects. In this work we compare a number of approaches to automatic language identification for this collection. We show that in comparison to typical language identification tasks, classification performance for highly similar languages with little training data is low. The studied dataset consisting of over 39,000 documents in 16 languages and dialects is available on request for followup research.
The paper will be presented at the LREC workshop Adaptation of Language Resources and Tools for Processing Cultural Heritage on 16 May 2012 in Istanbul, Turkey.
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