Natural Language Processing for Historical Texts

Michael Piotrowski is head of the Digital Humanities research group at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz, Germany. Before this, he worked as a postdoc researcher with the Law Sources Foundation of the Swiss Lawyers Society and was an adjunct lecturer at the Institute of Computational Linguistics of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. He received his doctoral degree in Computer Science in 2009 from Otto von Guericke University Magdeburg, Germany. He also holds an M.A. in Computational Linguistics, English Philology, and Applied Linguistics from Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. His main research interests are language technology for historical texts, document engineering, interactive editing and authoring aids, and e-learning technology.

• 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.