[Corpora-List] New book: Piotrowski, Natural Language Processing for Historical Texts

[Graeme Hirst]

NEW BOOK

Natural Language Processing for Historical Texts
by Michael Piotrowski, Leibniz Institute of European History, Germany

Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies #17
(Morgan & Claypool Publishers), 2012, 157 pages

Abstract

More and more historical texts are becoming available in digital
form. Digitization of paper documents is motivated by the aim of
preserving cultural heritage and making it more accessible, both to
laypeople and scholars. As digital images cannot be searched for text,
digitization projects increasingly strive to create digital text,
which can be searched and otherwise automatically processed, in
addition to facsimiles. Indeed, the emerging field of digital
humanities heavily relies on the availability of digital text for its
studies.

Together with the increasing availability of historical texts in
digital form, there is a growing interest in applying natural language
processing (NLP) methods and tools to historical texts. However, the
specific linguistic properties of historical texts -- the lack of
standardized orthography, in particular -- pose special challenges for
NLP.

This book aims to give an introduction to NLP for historical texts and
an overview of the state of the art in this field. The book starts
with an overview of methods for the acquisition of historical texts
(scanning and OCR), discusses text encoding and annotation schemes,
and presents examples of corpora of historical texts in a variety of
languages. The book then discusses specific methods, such as creating
part-of-speech taggers for historical languages or handling spelling
variation. A final chapter analyzes the relationship between NLP and
the digital humanities.

Certain recently emerging textual genres, such as SMS, social media,
and chat messages, or newsgroup and forum postings share a number of
properties with historical texts, for example, nonstandard orthography
and grammar, and profuse use of abbreviations. The methods and
techniques required for the effective processing of historical texts
are thus also of interest for research in other domains.

Table of Contents: Introduction / NLP and Digital Humanities /
Spelling in Historical Texts / Acquiring Historical Texts / Text
Encoding and Annotation Schemes / Handling Spelling Variation / NLP
Tools for Historical Languages / Historical Corpora / Conclusion /
Bibliography

http://www.morganclaypool.com/doi/pdf/10.2200/S00436ED1V01Y201207HLT017

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