# Unveiling Factors for Enhanced POS Tagging: A Study of Low-Resource Medieval Romance Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17715 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.17715/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [The Curious Case of Neural Text Degeneration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09751/) (2019)
- [Beam Search Strategies for Neural Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01806/) (2017)
- [Low-Resource Name Tagging Learned with Weakly Labeled Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.09659/) (2019)
- [A Large-Scale Comparison of Historical Text Normalization Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.02036/) (2019)
- [Parameter Space Factorization for Zero-Shot Learning across Tasks and Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.11453/) (2020)
- [Improving Zero-shot Cross-lingual Transfer between Closely Related Languages by injecting Character-level Noise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06772/) (2021)
- [Does Manipulating Tokenization Aid Cross-Lingual Transfer? A Study on POS Tagging for Non-Standardized Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10158/) (2023)
- [Reducing Confusion in Active Learning for Part-Of-Speech Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00767/) (2020)
- [Part-of-Speech Tagging on an Endangered Language: a Parallel Griko-Italian Resource](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03757/) (2018)
- [Distant Supervision from Disparate Sources for Low-Resource Part-of-Speech Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09733/) (2018)
- [A Grounded Unsupervised Universal Part-of-Speech Tagger for Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.05426/) (2019)
- [Weakly Supervised POS Taggers Perform Poorly on Truly Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.13305/) (2020)
- [ToPro: Token-Level Prompt Decomposition for Cross-Lingual Sequence Labeling Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.16589/) (2024)
- [A Falta de Pan, Buenas Son Tortas: The Efficacy of Predicted UPOS Tags for Low Resource UD Parsing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04222/) (2021)
- [From FreEM to D'AlemBERT: a Large Corpus and a Language Model for Early Modern French](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09452/) (2022)
- [Graph-Based Multilingual Label Propagation for Low-Resource Part-of-Speech Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09840/) (2022)
- [Corpus and Models for Lemmatisation and POS-tagging of Old French](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.11442/) (2021)
- [The Best of Both Worlds: Lexical Resources To Improve Low-Resource Part-of-Speech Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.08757/) (2018)
- [How Low is Too Low? A Computational Perspective on Extremely Low-Resource Languages](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14515/) (2021)
- [The Importance of Context in Very Low Resource Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.04810/) (2022)
- [Zero Resource Cross-Lingual Part Of Speech Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05727/) (2024)
- [Modern Models, Medieval Texts: A POS Tagging Study of Old Occitan](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07827/) (2025)
- [Bridging Pre-trained Language Models and Hand-crafted Features for Unsupervised POS Tagging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10315/) (2022)
- [Heidelberg-Boston @ SIGTYP 2024 Shared Task: Enhancing Low-Resource Language Analysis With Character-Aware Hierarchical Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20145/) (2024)
- [Recipe for Zero-shot POS Tagging: Is It Useful in Realistic Scenarios?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10576/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Lost in Translation? Exploring the Shift in Grammatical Gender from Latin to Occitan](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.09156/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Part-of-speech (POS) tagging remains a foundational component in natural language processing pipelines, particularly critical for historical text analysis at the intersection of computational linguistics and digital humanities. Despite significant advancements in modern large language models (LLMs) for ancient languages, their application to Medieval Romance languages presents distinctive challenges stemming from diachronic linguistic evolution, spelling variations, and labeled data scarcity. This study systematically investigates the central determinants of POS tagging performance across diverse corpora of Medieval Occitan, Medieval Spanish, and Medieval French texts, spanning biblical, hagiographical, medical, and dietary domains. Through rigorous experimentation, we evaluate how fine-tuning approaches, prompt engineering, model architectures, decoding strategies, and cross-lingual transfer learning techniques affect tagging accuracy. Our results reveal both notable limitations in LLMs' ability to process historical language variations and non-standardized spelling, as well as promising specialized techniques that effectively address the unique challenges presented by low-resource historical languages.