creators_name: Baron, A.
creators_name: Rayson, P.
creators_id: a.baron@comp.lancs.ac.uk
creators_id: 
type: conference_item
datestamp: 2008-08-13 08:43:17
lastmod: 2008-08-13 08:43:17
metadata_visibility: show
title: VARD2: A tool for dealing with spelling variation in historical corpora
ispublished: pub
subjects: QA75
full_text_status: public
pres_type: paper
abstract: When applying corpus linguistic techniques to historical corpora, the corpus
researcher should be cautious about the results obtained. Corpus annotation
techniques such as part of speech tagging, trained for modern languages, are
particularly vulnerable to inaccuracy due to vocabulary and grammatical shifts in language over time. Basic corpus retrieval techniques such as frequency profiling and concordancing will also be affected, in addition to the more sophisticated techniques such as keywords, n-grams, clusters and lexical bundles which rely on word frequencies for their calculations. In this paper, we highlight these problems with particular focus on Early Modern English corpora. We also present an overview of the VARD tool, our proposed solution to this problem, which facilitates pre-processing of historical corpus data by inserting modern equivalents alongside historical spelling variants. Recent improvements to the VARD tool include the incorporation of techniques used in modern spell checking software.
date: 2008-05
date_type: published
event_title: Postgraduate Conference in Corpus Linguistics
event_location: Aston University, Birmingham
event_dates: 22nd May 2008
event_type: conference
refereed: FALSE
official_url: http://acorn.aston.ac.uk/conf_proceedings.html
related_url_type: org
citation: Baron, A. and Rayson, P. (2008) VARD2: A tool for dealing with spelling variation in historical corpora. In: Postgraduate Conference in Corpus Linguistics, 22nd May 2008, Aston University, Birmingham.
document_url: http://eprints.comp.lancs.ac.uk/1817/1/BaronRaysonAston2008.pdf