Natural Language Processing for Historical Texts

Piotrowski, Michael

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-02146-6

Cited by 59 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 88 publications

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“…Information retrieval of historical newspapers has several challenges, among which are, e.g. OCR quality, spelling variation of historical language, lack of proper tools for natural language processing of older language and lack of structure in the optically read documents (Lopresti, 2009;Gotscharek et al, 2011;Piotrowski, 2012;J€ arvelin et al, 2016;Karlgren et al, 2019;Pfanzelter et al, 2021;Torget et al, 2022). In their present state, historical newspapers are a hard task for information retrieval engines, and users of the collections, such as researchers of digital humanities, are many times not very satisfied with the search possibilities and may have low trust in the search results (Jarlbrink and Snickars, 2017;Pfanzelter et al, 2021).…”

Section: Related Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optical character recognition quality affects subjective user perception of historical newspaper clippings

Kettunen

Keskustalo

Kumpulainen

et al. 2023

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PurposeThis study aims to identify user perception of different qualities of optical character recognition (OCR) in texts. The purpose of this paper is to study the effect of different quality OCR on users' subjective perception through an interactive information retrieval task with a collection of one digitized historical Finnish newspaper.Design/methodology/approachThis study is based on the simulated work task model used in interactive information retrieval. Thirty-two users made searches to an article collection of Finnish newspaper Uusi Suometar 1869–1918 which consists of ca. 1.45 million autosegmented articles. The article search database had two versions of each article with different quality OCR. Each user performed six pre-formulated and six self-formulated short queries and evaluated subjectively the top 10 results using a graded relevance scale of 0–3. Users were not informed about the OCR quality differences of the otherwise identical articles.FindingsThe main result of the study is that improved OCR quality affects subjective user perception of historical newspaper articles positively: higher relevance scores are given to better-quality texts.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this simulated interactive work task experiment is the first one showing empirically that users' subjective relevance assessments are affected by a change in the quality of an optically read text.

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Section: Related Researchmentioning

confidence: 99%

Optical character recognition quality affects subjective user perception of historical newspaper clippings

Kettunen

Keskustalo

Kumpulainen

et al. 2023

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“…Applying NLP tools, such as POS taggers, syntactic parsers, and named entity recognisers to historical texts is difficult, because most existing NLP tools are developed for modern languages [118,140] and historical language use often differs significantly from its modern counterpart. The two often have different linguistic aspects, such as lexicon, morphology, syntax, and semantics which make a naive use of these tools problematic [144,159].…”

Section: Nlp Challengesmentioning

confidence: 99%

LL(O)D and NLP perspectives on semantic change for humanities research

Armaselu

Apostol

Khan

et al. 2022

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This paper presents an overview of the LL(O)D and NLP methods, tools and data for detecting and representing semantic change, with its main application in humanities research. The paper’s aim is to provide the starting point for the construction of a workflow and set of multilingual diachronic ontologies within the humanities use case of the COST Action Nexus Linguarum, European network for Web-centred linguistic data science, CA18209. The survey focuses on the essential aspects needed to understand the current trends and to build applications in this area of study.

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“…Projects, scientific meetings 1 and studies like OPATCH dealing with historical texts (Piotrowski, 2012) are numerous and one recurring theme is the struggle for clean OCR-ed data.…”

Section: Previous Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Grasping this unique opportunity however calls for advanced methods for the automatic semantic analysis of digital historical sources. The application of NLP methods and tools to historical texts is indeed attracting growing interest and raises in-teresting and highly challenging research issues (Piotrowsky 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

EVENTI: EValuation of Events and Temporal INformation at Evalita 2014

Caselli¹,

Sprugnoli²,

Speranza³

2014

Proceedings of the First Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics CLiC-it 2014 and of the Fourth International Workshop

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We are glad to introduce CLiC-it 2014 (http://clic.humnet.unipi.it), the first edition of the Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics, a new event aiming to establish a reference forum for research on Computational Linguistics of the Italian community. CLiC-it covers all aspects of automatic language understanding, both written and spoken, and targets state-of-art theoretical results, experimental methodologies, technologies, as well as application perspectives, which may contribute to advance the field.CLiC-it 2014 is held in Pisa on December 9-10 2014, and it is co-located with EVALITA-2014 (http://www.evalita.it), the fourth edition of the evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech tools for Italian and with the XIII Symposium on Artificial Intelligence (Pisa, 10-12 December 2014, http://aiia2014.di.unipi.it/).Pisa is a special place in the history of Italian Computational Linguistics. Here, Padre Roberto Busa carried out his pioneering research on automatic text processing in the late '60s with Antonio Zampolli, who then founded the Istituto di Linguistica Computazionale of CNR in Pisa, the first research center thoroughly devoted to Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing. The University of Pisa also hosted the first professorship in Computational Linguistics held by Antonio Zampolli until his death in 2003.It is therefore highly symbolic that the Italian community on Computational Linguistics gathers for the first time in Pisa, there where its roots lie. Italian Computational Linguistics has come a long way. Research groups and centers are now spread nationwide and play an active role on the international scene. The large number of researchers that have decided to present their work to CLiC-it is the best proof of the maturity of our community, strongly committed to shape the future of Computational Linguistics.The spirit of CLiC-it is inclusive. In the conviction that the complexity of language phenomena needs cross-disciplinary competences, CLiC-it intends to bring together researchers of related disciplines such as

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Natural Language Processing for Historical Texts

Cited by 59 publications

References 88 publications

Optical character recognition quality affects subjective user perception of historical newspaper clippings

Optical character recognition quality affects subjective user perception of historical newspaper clippings

LL(O)D and NLP perspectives on semantic change for humanities research

EVENTI: EValuation of Events and Temporal INformation at Evalita 2014

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