From historic books to annotated XML: Building a large multilingual diachronic corpus

Abstract

This paper introduces our approach towards annotating a large heritage corpus, which spans over 100 years of alpine literature. The corpus consists of over 16.000 articles from the yearbooks of the Swiss Alpine Club, 60% of which represent German texts, 38% French, 1% Italian and the remaining 1% Swiss German and Romansh. The present work describes the inherent difficulties in processing a multilingual corpus by referring to the most challenging annotation phases such as article identification, correction of optical character recognition (OCR) errors, tokenization, and language identification. The paper aims to raise awareness for the
efforts in building and annotating multilingual corpora rather than to evaluate each individual annotation phase.
Keywords: multilingual corpora, cultural heritage, corpus annotation, text digitization