Construction and Annotation of a French Folkstale Corpus

In this paper, we present the digitization and annotation of a tales corpus which is to our knowledge the only French tales corpus available and classified according to the Aarne&Thompson classification composed of historical texts (with old French parts). We first studied whether the pre-processing tools, namely OCR and PoS-tagging, have good enough accuracies to allow automatic analysis. We also manually annotated this corpus according to several types of information which could prove useful for future work: character references, episodes, and motifs. The contributions are the creation of an corpus of French tales from classical anthropology material, which will be made available to the community; the evaluation of OCR and NLP tools on this noisy corpus; and the annotation with anthropological information.