The Strengths and Pitfalls of Large-Scale Text Mining for Literary Studies

This paper is an overview of the opportunities and challenges of using large-scale text mining to answer research questions that stem from the humanities in general and literature specifically. In this paper, we will discuss a data-intensive research methodology and how different views of digital text affect answers to research questions. We will discuss results derived from text mining, how these results can be evaluated, and their relation to hypotheses and research questions. Finally, we will discuss some pitfalls of computational literary analysis and give some pointers as to how these can be avoided.Peer reviewe

Text Mining for User Query Analysis: A 5-Step Method for Cultural Heritage Institutions

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Semantic Enrichment of a Multilingual Archive with Linked Open Data

This paper introduces MERCKX, a Multilingual Entity/Resource Combiner & Knowledge eXtractor. A case study involving the semantic enrichment of a multilingual archive is presented with the aim of assessing the relevance of natural language processing techniques such as named-entity recognition and entity linking for cultural heritage material. In order to improve the indexing of historical collections, we map entities to the Linked Open Data cloud using a language-independent method. Our evaluation shows that MERCKX outperforms similar tools on the task of place disambiguation and linking, achieving over 80% precision despite lower recall scores. These results are encouraging for small and medium-size cultural institutions since they demonstrate that semantic enrichment can be achieved with limited resources.Peer reviewe

An Unsupervised method for OCR Post-Correction and Spelling Normalisation for Finnish

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The omnipresence of the nation

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Dataset for Temporal Analysis of English-French Cognates

Languages change over time and, thanks to the abundance of digital corpora, their evolutionary analysis using computational techniques has recently gained much research attention. In this paper, we focus on creating a dataset to support investigating the similarity in evolution between different languages. We look in particular into the similarities and differences between the use of corresponding words across time in English and French, two languages from different linguistic families yet with shared syntax and close contact. For this we select a set of cognates in both languages and study their frequency changes and correlations over time. We propose a new dataset for computational approaches of synchronized diachronic investigation of language pairs, and subsequently show novel findings stemming from the cognate-focused diachronic comparison of the two chosen languages. To the best of our knowledge, the present study is the first in the literature to use computational approaches and large data to make a cross-language diachronic analysis.Peer reviewe