With the increasing number of documents that are available in digital form, also the number of digital historical documents is increasing (Berkvens, 2001). It cannot be assumed that standard IR systems perform well on historical documents: historical texts differ from modern texts in three ways (Hüning, 1996; Van Der Horst and Marschall, 1989): (a) vocabularies have changed, (b) spelling has ch...

The article analyzes mental representations of Russian lyrical prose texts. The texts demonstrate collective memory engrams that are defined by cultural and historical legacy of the nation and authors’ creative world perception. In architectonics of a lyrical prose text, sense perception reveals itself in accumulated underlying meanings and wisdom conveyed by expressive means. The author’s inte...

We present some experiments on text segmentation for German texts aimed at developing a method of segmenting historical texts. Since such texts have no (consistent) punctuation, we use a machine learning approach to label tokens with their relative positions in text segments using Conditional Random Fields. We compare the performance of this approach on the task of segmenting of text into sente...

Dimitrios Kokkinakis and Mats Malm Introduction Multifaceted relations between texts can be complex, abstract, diverse or subtle. Digital humanists are interested in identifying pairs of text passages likely to contain substantial overlap and empirically supporting (hopefully) new interpretations of historical texts. For instance, Cordell [3] discusses how digital interpretive tools can help ma...

Transcribing documents from the printing press era, a challenge in its own right, is more complicated when documents interleave multiple languages—a common feature of 16th century texts. Additionally, many of these documents precede consistent orthographic conventions, making the task even harder. We extend the state-of-the-art historical OCR model of Berg-Kirkpatrick et al. (2013) to handle wo...

We explore the task of automatically assigning syntactic tags (known as part-of-speech tags) like Noun and Verb to words in seventeenth-century Dutch text. Tools exist for performing this task for modern texts but they perform poorly on historical texts because of language changes. We test several methods for translating the words in the historical text to modern equivalents before applying the...

This paper deals with the construction of a maximally flexible corpus architecture for building and analyzing diachronic corpora. Historical data poses many challenges with regard to representation and analysis, and diachronic corpora are even more varied and unsystematic (Claridge, 2008). Since historical and diachronic corpora are so difficult and expensive to build, it is crucial that they b...