Workshop on Language Technology for Cultural Heritage , Social Sciences , and Humanities

ii Preface The LaTeCH (Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences, and Humanities) annual workshop series aims to provide a forum for researchers who are working on aspects of natural language and information technology applications that pertain to data from the humanities, social sciences, and cultural heritage. The LaTeCH workshops were initially motivated by the growing interest in language technology research and applications for the cultural heritage domain. The scope has soon nevertheless broadened to also include the humanities and the social sciences. Current developments in web and information access have triggered a series of digitisation efforts by museums, archives, libraries and other cultural heritage institutions. Similar developments in humanities and social sciences have resulted in large amounts of data becoming available in electronic format, either as digitised, or as born-digital data. The natural next step to digitisation is the intelligent processing of this data. To this end, the humanities, social sciences, and cultural heritage domains draw an increasing interest from researchers in NLP aiming at developing methods for semantic enrichment and information discovery and access. Language technology has been conventionally focused on certain domains, such as newswire. These fairly novel domains of cultural heritage, social sciences, and humanities entail new challenges to NLP research, such as noisy text (e.g., due to OCR problems), non-standard, or archaic language varieties (e.g., historic language, dialects, mixed use of languages, ellipsis, transcription errors), literary or figurative writing style and lack of knowledge resources, such as dictionaries. Furthermore, often neither annotated domain data is available, nor the required funds to manually create it, thus forcing researchers to investigate (semi-) automatic resource development and domain adaptation approaches involving the least possible manual effort. In the current edition of the LaTeCH workshop, we have received a record number of submissions, a subset of which has been selected based on a thorough peer-review process. A central issue for the majority of contributions to this LaTeCH workshop has been the problem of linguistic processing for historical language varieties (e.g., Spanish, Czech, German, Slovene and Swedish) and the respective resource development and tool adaptation. In terms of applications, the contributions attempt to provide language technology solutions for cultural heritage and humanities researchers ranging from historians and architecture historians to linguists, cultural heritage curators, ethnologists and literary critics. The text types targeted for analysis range from full-text to semi-structured text, while the domains addressed range from the analysis of historical …