Digitization of Old Romanian Texts Printed in the Cyrillic Script

Proceedings of the Workshop Knowledge Resources for the Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities

Mititelu³

2017

The UAIC-RoDia-DepTb is a balanced treebank, containing texts in non-standard language: 2,575 chats sentences, old Romanian texts (a Gospel printed in 1648, a codex of laws printed in 1818, a novel written in 1910), regional popular poetry, legal texts, Romanian and foreign fiction, quotations. The proportions are comparable; each of these types of texts is represented by subsets of at least 1,000 phrases, so that the parser can be trained on their peculiarities. The annotation of the treebank started in 2007, and it has classical tags, such as those in school grammar, with the intention of using the resource for didactic purposes. The classification of circumstantial modifiers is rich in semantic information. We present in this paper the development in progress of this resource which has been automatically annotated and entirely manually corrected. We try to add new texts, and to make it available in more formats, by keeping all the morphological and syntactic information annotated, and adding logicalsemantic information. We will describe here two conversions, from the classic syntactic format into Universal Dependencies format and into a logical-semantic layer, which will be shortly presented.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Multiform Balanced Dependency Treebank for Romanian

Colhon¹,

Proceedings of the Workshop Knowledge Resources for the Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities

Mititelu³

2017

“…These texts were cleaned of the meta-text, specialists comments and notes, then processed by a concordancer program that builds indexes and makes statistics of the number of occurrences for each form in all the 500 books in text format opened. (Cojocaru et al, 2017). In the case of the Romanian language written with Cyrillic, we used the same lexicon for the Old-Romanian POS-tagger and for the OCR program, having two variants, with the word forms written in Latin letters and written in Cyrillic letters, trying to help our colleagues to increase the performances of the OCR for Romanian Cyrillic letters.…”

Section: The Lexicon For the Old Ro Pos-taggermentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The letters differ from one book to another and there are many transitional alphabets with mixed Latin and Cyrillic letters. Our colleagues from the Institute of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Academy of Sciences of Moldova are now building an OCR which began operating satisfactorily for some texts (Cojocaru et al, 2017).…”

Section: The Lexicon For the Old Ro Pos-taggermentioning

confidence: 99%

Tools for Building a Corpus to Study the Historical and Geographical Variation of the Romanian Language

Bobicev¹,

Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Technology for Digital Humanities in Central and (South-)Eastern Europe

Perez³

2017

Contemporary standard language corpora are ideal for NLP. There are few morphologically and syntactically annotated corpora for Romanian, and those existing or in progress only deal with the Contemporary Romanian standard. However, the necessity to study the dynamics of natural languages gave rise to balanced corpora, containing non-standard texts. In this paper, we describe the creation of tools for processing non-standard Romanian to build a big balanced corpus. We want to preserve in annotated form as many early stages of language as possible. We have already built a corpus in Old Romanian. We also intend to include the South-Danube dialects, remote to the standard language, along with regional forms closer to the standard. We try to preserve data about endangered idioms such as Aromanian, Meglenoromanian and Istroromanian dialects, and calculate the distance between different regional variants, including the language spoken in the Republic of Moldova. This distance, as well as the mutual understanding between the speakers, is the correct criterion for the classification of idioms as different languages, or as dialects, or as regional variants close to the standard.

“…The researchers of Chisinau have processed the print in two steps. In the first step, they obtained an editable form of the book with Old Cyrillic characters (Cojocaru et al, 2017). The computational linguists of Iasi have remarked that three characters are not in the "times extro" set.…”

Section: The Ocr Program For the Old Cyrillic Booksmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Diachronic Corpus for Romanian (RoDia)

Malahov¹,

Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Technology for Digital Humanities in Central and (South-)Eastern Europe

Colesnicov³

2017

This paper describes a Romanian Dependency Treebank, built at the Al. I. Cuza University (UAIC), and a special OCR techniques used to build it. The corpus has rich morphological and syntactic annotation. There are few annotated representative corpora in Romanian, and the existent ones are mainly focused on the contemporary Romanian standard. The corpus described below is focused on the nonstandard aspects of the language, the Regional and the Old Romanian. Having the intention to participate at the PROIEL project, which aligns oldest New Testaments, we annotate the first printed Romanian New Testament (Alba Iulia, 1648). We began by applying the UAIC tools for the morphological and syntactic processing of Contemporary Romanian over the books first quarter (second edition). By carefully manually correcting the result of the automated annotation (having a modest accuracy) we obtained a sub-corpus for the training of tools for the Old Romanian processing. But the first edition of the New Testament is written in Cyrillic letters. The existence of books printed in the Old Cyrillic alphabet is a common problem for Romania and The Republic of Moldova, countries where the Romanian is spoken; a problem to solve by the joint efforts of the NLP researchers in the two countries.