An automatic part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German

Syntactically annotated corpora are highly important for enabling large-scale diachronic and diatopic language research. Such corpora have recently been developed for a variety of historical languages, or are still under development. One of those under development is the fully tagged and parsed Corpus of Historical Low German (CHLG), which is aimed at facilitating research into the highly under-researched diachronic syntax of Low German. The present paper reports on a crucial step in creating the corpus, viz. the creation of a part-of-speech tagger for Middle Low German (MLG). Having been transmitted in several non-standardised written varieties, MLG poses a challenge to standard POS taggers, which usually rely on normalized spelling. We outline the major issues faced in the creation of the tagger and present our solutions to them

Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Annotation of Corpora for Research in the Humanities (ACRH-2). 29 November 2012, Lisbon, Portugal

Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Annotation of Corpora for Research in the Humanities (ACRH-2), held in Lisbon, Portugal on 29 November 2012

Manuscripts and machines: the automatic replacement of spelling variants in a Portuguese historical corpus

The CARDS-FLY project aims to collect and transcribe a diverse sample of historical personal letters from the 16th to 20th century in a digital format to create a linguistic resource for the historical study of the Portuguese language and society. The letters were written by people from all social layers of society and their historical, social and pragmatic contexts are documented in the digital format. Here we study one particular aspect of this collection, namely the spelling variation. Furthermore, on the basis of this analysis, we improved a statistical spelling normalisation tool that we aim to use to automatically normalise the spelling in the full collection of digitised letters.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Guidelines for normalising early modern English corpora:decisions and justifications

Corpora of Early Modern English have been collected and released for research for a number of years. With large scale digitisation activities gathering pace in the last decade, much more historical textual data is now available for research on numerous topics including historical linguistics and conceptual history. We summarise previous research which has shown that it is necessary to map historical spelling variants to modern equivalents in order to successfully apply natural language processing and corpus linguistics methods. Manual and semiautomatic methods have been devised to support this normalisation and standardisation process. We argue that it is important to develop a linguistically meaningful rationale to achieve good results from this process. In order to do so, we propose a number of guidelines for normalising corpora and show how these guidelines have been applied in the Corpus of English Dialogues

Plague Dot Text:Text mining and annotation of outbreak reports of the Third Plague Pandemic (1894-1952)

The design of models that govern diseases in population is commonly built on information and data gathered from past outbreaks. However, epidemic outbreaks are never captured in statistical data alone but are communicated by narratives, supported by empirical observations. Outbreak reports discuss correlations between populations, locations and the disease to infer insights into causes, vectors and potential interventions. The problem with these narratives is usually the lack of consistent structure or strong conventions, which prohibit their formal analysis in larger corpora. Our interdisciplinary research investigates more than 100 reports from the third plague pandemic (1894-1952) evaluating ways of building a corpus to extract and structure this narrative information through text mining and manual annotation. In this paper we discuss the progress of our ongoing exploratory project, how we enhance optical character recognition (OCR) methods to improve text capture, our approach to structure the narratives and identify relevant entities in the reports. The structured corpus is made available via Solr enabling search and analysis across the whole collection for future research dedicated, for example, to the identification of concepts. We show preliminary visualisations of the characteristics of causation and differences with respect to gender as a result of syntactic-category-dependent corpus statistics. Our goal is to develop structured accounts of some of the most significant concepts that were used to understand the epidemiology of the third plague pandemic around the globe. The corpus enables researchers to analyse the reports collectively allowing for deep insights into the global epidemiological consideration of plague in the early twentieth century.Comment: Journal of Data Mining & Digital Humanities 202

The TXM Portal Software giving access to Old French Manuscripts Online

Texte intégral en ligne : http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/workshops/13.ProceedingsCultHeritage.pdfInternational audiencehttp://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2012/workshops/13.ProceedingsCultHeritage.pdf This paper presents the new TXM software platform giving online access to Old French Text Manuscripts images and tagged transcriptions for concordancing and text mining. This platform is able to import medieval sources encoded in XML according to the TEI Guidelines for linking manuscript images to transcriptions, encode several diplomatic levels of transcription including abbreviations and word level corrections. It includes a sophisticated tokenizer able to deal with TEI tags at different levels of linguistic hierarchy. Words are tagged on the fly during the import process using IMS TreeTagger tool with a specific language model. Synoptic editions displaying side by side manuscript images and text transcriptions are automatically produced during the import process. Texts are organized in a corpus with their own metadata (title, author, date, genre, etc.) and several word properties indexes are produced for the CQP search engine to allow efficient word patterns search to build different type of frequency lists or concordances. For syntactically annotated texts, special indexes are produced for the Tiger Search engine to allow efficient syntactic concordances building. The platform has also been tested on classical Latin, ancient Greek, Old Slavonic and Old Hieroglyphic Egyptian corpora (including various types of encoding and annotations)