Manuscripts and Machines: The Automatic Replacement of Spelling Variants in a Portuguese Historical Corpus. Issue 1 (April 2014)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Marquilhas, Rita; Hendrickx, Iris
• Is Part Of: International journal of humanities and arts computing. Volume 8:Issue 1(2014)
• Page Start: 65
• Page End: 80
• Publication Date: 2014-04
• Subjects: historical linguistics -- spelling variation -- automatic normalization -- Portuguese; Humanities -- Data processing -- Periodicals; Arts -- Data processing -- Periodicals; 001.30285
• DOI: 10.3366/ijhac.2014.0120
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1753-8548

Abstract

Abstract : The CARDS-FLY project aims to collect and transcribe a diverse sample of historical personal letters from the 16 th to 20 th century in a digital format to create a linguistic resource for the historical study of the Portuguese language and society. The letters were written by people from all social layers of society and their historical, social and pragmatic contexts are documented in the digital format. Here we study one particular aspect of this collection, namely the spelling variation. Furthermore, on the basis of this analysis, we improved a statistical spelling normalisation tool that we aim to use to automatically normalise the spelling in the full collection of digitised letters.