Two Approaches to Diachronic Normalization of Polish Texts

Abstract

This paper discusses two approaches to the diachronic normalization of Polish texts: a rule-based solution that relies on a set of handcrafted patterns, and a neural normalization model based on the text-to-text transfer transformer architecture. The training and evaluation data prepared for the task are discussed in detail, along with experiments conducted to compare the proposed normalization solutions. A quantitative and qualitative analysis is made. It is shown that at the current stage of inquiry into the problem, the rule-based solution outperforms the neural one on 3 out of 4 variants of the prepared dataset, although in practice both approaches have distinct advantages and disadvantages.