Abstract
We present a publicly available corpus of nineteenth-century newspaper text focused on crime in London, derived from the Gale British Library Newspapers corpus parts 1 and 2. The corpus comprises 600 newspaper excerpts and for each excerpt contains the original source image, the machine transcription of that image as found in the BLN and a gold standard manual transcription that we have created. We envisage the corpus will be helpful for the training and development of OCR and post-OCR correction methodologies for historical newspaper machine transcription—for which there is currently a dearth of publicly available resources. In this paper, we discuss the rationale behind gathering such a corpus, the methodology used to select, process, and align the data, and the corpus’ potential utility for historians and digital humanities researchers—particularly within the realms of neural machine translation-based post-OCR correction approaches, and other natural language processing tasks that are critically affected by erroneous OCR.- Anthology ID:
- 2024.lrec-main.219
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024)
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2024
- Address:
- Torino, Italia
- Editors:
- Nicoletta Calzolari, Min-Yen Kan, Veronique Hoste, Alessandro Lenci, Sakriani Sakti, Nianwen Xue
- Venues:
- LREC | COLING
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- ELRA and ICCL
- Note:
- Pages:
- 2440–2446
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.219
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Callum William Booth, Alan Thomas, and Robert Gaizauskas. 2024. BLN600: A Parallel Corpus of Machine/Human Transcribed Nineteenth Century Newspaper Texts. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC-COLING 2024), pages 2440–2446, Torino, Italia. ELRA and ICCL.
- Cite (Informal):
- BLN600: A Parallel Corpus of Machine/Human Transcribed Nineteenth Century Newspaper Texts (Booth et al., LREC-COLING 2024)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.lrec-main.219.pdf