Language Technology for Cultural Heritage

Caroline Sporleder leads a junior research group in the Cluster of Excellence Multimodal Computing and Interaction at Saarland University, Germany. Her research interests include text mining and error detection for cultural heritage data, cross-domain language processing, and computational modelling of semantics and discourse. Before coming to Saarland University, she worked as a post-doctoral researcher on the MITCH project (Mining for Information from the Cultural Heritage), a joint research project between Tilburg University, and Naturalis, the Dutch National Museum of Natural History. The project aimed at developing technology to clean, enrich and structure field books and other natural history data sources. Antal van den Bosch is a full professor of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence at Tilburg University. His research interests include machine learning of natural language; historical and heritage text mining; proofing and recommendation; and machine translation. He helped create the Dutch CATCH programme (Continuous Access to Cultural Heritage) funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, and has been PI of two CATCH projects: the aforementioned MITCH (with Caroline Sporleder) and the current HitiMe project (with Kalliopi Zervanou). He was guest editor of the special issue of the Interdisciplinary Science Review journal on Continuous access to cultural heritage published in 2009. Kalliopi A. Zervanou is a post-doctoral researcher in the HiTiME project (Historical Timeline Mining and Extraction), a joint research project by Tilburg Universitys Centre for Cognition and Communication (TiCC) and the International Institute of Social History. The project aims at the development of a text analysis system for the recognition and extraction of historical events and facts from a variety of primary and secondary historical sources. Previous to HiTiME, she worked as aresearcher at the University of Manchester, and the Technical University of Crete, in various information management and text mining projects. Her research interests include information extraction, knowledge acquisition and representation techniques, automatic term extraction and abstracting.

Foreword by Willard McCarty.- Language Technology for Cultural Heritage, Social Sciences and Humanities: Chances and Challenges. Caroline Sporleder, Antal van den Bosch and Kalliopi Zervanou.- Part I Pre-Processing.- Strategies for Reducing and Correcting OCR Errors. Martin Volk, Lenz Furrer and Rico Sennrich.- Alignment between Text Images and their Transcripts for Handwritten Documents. Alejandro H. Toselli, Vernica Romero and Enrique Vidal.- Part II Adapting NLP Tools to Older Language Varieties.- A Diachronic Computational Lexical Resource for 800 Years of Swedish. Lars Borin and Markus Forsberg.- Morphosyntactic Tagging of Old Icelandic Texts and Its Use in Studying Syntactic Variation and Change. Eirkur Rgnvaldsson and Sigrn Helgadttir.- Part III Linguistic Resources for CH/SSH.- The Ancient Greek and Latin Dependency Treebanks. David Bamman and Gregory Crane.- A Parallel Greek-Bulgarian Corpus: A Digital Resource of the Shared Cultural Heritage. Voula Giouli, Kiril Simov and Petya Osenova.- Part IV Personalisation.- Authoring Semantic and Linguistic Knowledge for the Dynamic Generation of Personalized Descriptions. Stasinos Konstantopoulos, Vangelis Karkaletsis, Dimitrios Vogiatzis and Dimitris Bilidas.- Part V Structural and Narrative Analysis Automatic Pragmatic Text Segmentation of Historical Letters. Iris Hendrickx, Michel Gnreux and Rita Marquilhas.- Proppian Content Descriptors in an Integrated Annotation Schema for Fairy Tales. Thierry Declerck, Antonia Scheidel and Piroska Lendvai.- Adapting NLP Tools and Frame-Semantic Resources for the Semantic Analysis of Ritual Descriptions. Nils Reiter, Oliver Hellwig, Anette Frank, Irina Gossmann, Borayin Maitreya Larios, Julio Rodrigues and Britta Zeller.- Part VI Data Management, Visualisation and Retrieval.- Information Retrieval and Visualization for the Historical Domain. Yevgeni Berzak, Michal Richter, Carsten Ehrler and Todd Shore.- IntegratingWiki Systems, Natural LanguageProcessing, and Semantic Technologies for Cultural Heritage Data Management. Ren Witte, Thomas Kappler, Ralf Krestel, and Peter C. Lockemann.