Renovating a worldclass tagset: from WOTAN to WOTAN-2 Hans van Halteren Dept. of Language and Speech University of Nijmegen hvh@let.kun.nl 1999 University of Virginia Charlottesville, VA ACH/ALLC 1999 editor encoder Sara A. Schmidt n 1994, a new wordclass tagset for Dutch was designed (WOTAN; Berghmans, 1994), for use in the upgrade of a tagged corpus of more than a million words (including the Eindhoven corpus; uit den Boogaart, 1975) and the subsequent derivation of an automatic tagger. WOTAN was based on the most popular descriptive grammar of Dutch (ANS; Geerts et al., 1984), from which the encoded distinctions were selected using two criteria: a) importance to potential users, as estimated from interviews and b) feasibility of (semi-)automatic derivation from the existing tagging, given the lack of time for extensive manual changes. WOTAN was judged to be a good compromise and has since been used in several tagging projects and experiments in the Netherlands and Belgium. Yet, WOTAN had its shortcomings, leading to the creation of a successor. WOTAN-2 adds some important distinctions originally left out because they needed manual intervention, and aims for compatibility with the EAGLES guidelines, the (extensively) revised version of the ANS (Haeseryn et al., 1997), the CELEX database and the AMAZON syntactic parser. Another, more uncertain, influence is the tagset to be used for the Spoken Dutch Corpus, which is presently under construction. The poster will present: the differences between WOTAN and WOTAN-2 the influence of the (sometimes contradictory) compatibility issues on the tagset additions to (or deviations from) the EAGLES proposal necessitated by decisions for WOTAN-2 the upgrade of the WOTAN-tagged Eindhoven corpus to a WOTAN-2 version References J. Berghmans WOTAN, een automatische grammatikale tagger voor het Nederlands Dept. of Language and Speech, University of Nijmegen 1994 Uit den Boogaart Woordfrequenties in geschreven en gesproken Nederlands Utrecht Oosthoek, Scheltema & Holkema 1975 G. Geerts W. Haeseryn J. de Rooij M. van der Toorn Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst (ANS) Leuven Wolters-Noordhoff, Groningen and Wolters 1984 W. Haeseryn K. Romijn G. Geerts J. de Rooij M. van der Toorn Algemene Nederlandse Spraakkunst (ANS) Deurne Martinus Nijhoff, Groningen and Wolters Plantyn 1997