Cross-Lingual and Cross-Chronological Information Access to Multilingual Historical Documents

Abstract

In this chapter, we present our work in realizing information access across different languages and periods. Nowadays, digital collections of historical documents have to handle materials written in many different languages in different time periods. Even in a particular language, there are significant differences over time in terms of grammar, vocabulary and script. Our goal is to develop a method to access digital collections in a wide range of periods from ancient to modern. We introduce an information extraction method for digitized ancient Mongolian historical manuscripts for reducing labour-intensive analysis. The proposed method performs computerized analysis on Mongolian historical documents. Named entities such as personal names and place names are extracted by employing support vector machine. The extracted named entities are utilized to create a digital edition that reflects an ancient Mongolian historical manuscript written in traditional Mongolian script. The Text Encoding Initiative guidelines are adopted to encode the named entities, transcriptions and interpretations of ancient words. A web-based prototype system is developed for utilizing digital editions of ancient Mongolian historical manuscripts as scholarly tools. The proposed prototype has the capability to display and search traditional Mongolian text and its transliteration in Latin letters along with the highlighted named entities and the scanned images of the source manuscript.