BLN600: A Parallel Corpus of Machine/Human Transcribed Nineteenth Century Newspaper Texts

Callum William Booth, Alan Thomas, Robert Gaizauskas


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:
Bibkey:
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)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.lrec-main.219.pdf