We present a new corpus comprising annotations of medical entities in case reports, originating from PubMed Central’s open access library. In the case reports, we annotate cases, conditions, findings, factors and negation modifiers. Moreover, where applicable, we annotate relations between these entities. As such, this is the first corpus of this kind made available to the scientific community in English. It enables the initial investigation of automatic information extraction from case reports through tasks like Named Entity Recognition, Relation Extraction and (sentence/paragraph) relevance detection. Additionally, we present four strong baseline systems for the detection of medical entities made available through the annotated dataset.

Coreference resolution is the task of grouping together references to the same discourse entity. Resolving coreference in literary texts could benefit a number of Digital Humanities (DH) tasks, such as analyzing the depiction of characters and/or their relations. Domain-dependent training data has shown to improve coreference resolution for many domains, e.g. the biomedical domain, as its properties differ significantly from news text or dialogue, on which automatic systems are typically trained. Literary texts could also benefit from corpora annotated with coreference. We therefore analyze the specific properties of coreference-related phenomena on a number of texts and give directions for the adaptation of annotation guidelines. As some of the adaptations have profound impact, we also present a new annotation tool for coreference, with a focus on enabling annotation of long texts with many discourse entities.

One of the main obstacles for many Digital Humanities projects is the low data availability. Texts have to be digitized in an expensive and time consuming process whereas Optical Character Recognition (OCR) post-correction is one of the time-critical factors. At the example of OCR post-correction, we show the adaptation of a generic system to solve a specific problem with little data. The system accounts for a diversity of errors encountered in OCRed texts coming from different time periods in the domain of literature. We show that the combination of different approaches, such as e.g. Statistical Machine Translation and spell checking, with the help of a ranking mechanism tremendously improves over single-handed approaches. Since we consider the accessibility of the resulting tool as a crucial part of Digital Humanities collaborations, we describe the workflow we suggest for efficient text recognition and subsequent automatic and manual post-correction

In this paper, we investigate unsupervised and semi-supervised methods for part-of-speech (PoS) tagging in the context of historical German text. We locate our research in the context of Digital Humanities where the non-canonical nature of text causes issues facing an Natural Language Processing world in which tools are mainly trained on standard data. Data deviating from the norm requires tools adjusted to this data. We explore to which extend the availability of such training material and resources related to it influences the accuracy of PoS tagging. We investigate a variety of algorithms including neural nets, conditional random fields and self-learning techniques in order to find the best-fitted approach to tackle data sparsity. Although methods using resources from related languages outperform weakly supervised methods using just a few training examples, we can still reach a promising accuracy with methods abstaining additional resources.

In this paper we present a Dutch and English dataset that can serve as a gold standard for evaluating text normalization approaches. With the combination of text messages, message board posts and tweets, these datasets represent a variety of user generated content. All data was manually normalized to their standard form using newly-developed guidelines. We perform automatic lexical normalization experiments on these datasets using statistical machine translation techniques. We focus on both the word and character level and find that we can improve the BLEU score with ca. 20% for both languages. In order for this user generated content data to be released publicly to the research community some issues first need to be resolved. These are discussed in closer detail by focussing on the current legislation and by investigating previous similar data collection projects. With this discussion we hope to shed some light on various difficulties researchers are facing when trying to share social media data.