Experiments with Automatic and Semi-automatic Detection of Sparse Word Forms in Old Braj.

This paper presents the work on automatic converb detection in Old Braj poetry from the 15-17 centuries. This is a part of research on non-finite verbal forms in early New Indo-Aryan (NIA) language corpora comprising data from Old Rajasthani, Awadhi, Braj, Dakkhini and Pahari [8]. The goal of the detection mechanism is to successfully identify a plaintext word as a converb or non-converb. Such mechanism facilitates further converb description and analysis, which is of great importance in research on historical syntax of NIA. In order to develop the automatic detector, a selection of state-of-art statistical classification mechanisms was used.