Developing a Digital Library of Historical Records in Traditional Mongolian Script

Abstract

This article discusses the authors' approach in creating a digital library which can be used to access ancient historical documents written in traditional Mongolian script using a query in modern Mongolian (Cyrillic). They introduce a Traditional Mongolian Script Digital Library (TMSDL), which aims to preserve over 800 years of historical records written in traditional Mongolian for future use and to make them available for public viewing. The authors present their approaches to solve two major problems for realizing such a digital library; 1) accessing ancient documents using a query in modern Mongolian, and 2) rendering traditional Mongolian script properly. They implement an "ancient-to-modern information retrieval" method, which takes into account historical differences in the writing systems of the ancient and modern Mongolian languages. The authors' results are explored further in the article.

Cross-Lingual and Cross-Chronological Information Access to Multilingual Historical Documents

“…A few ancient Mongolian historical manuscripts including (1) 'Qad-un ündüsünü quriyangγui altan tobči neretü sudur' (the Altan Tobchi or the Golden Summary: Short history of the Origins of the Khans) (written in 1604) a.k.a. 'Little' Altan Tobchi and (2) the 'Asaraγči neretü-yin teüke' or 'Asragch nėrtĭĭn tuukh' (the Story of Asragch) (written in 1677), which were written in traditional Mongolian script, have been converted to digital texts and made publicly available through the traditional Mongolian script digital library (TMSDL) [7]. Figure 1 shows a folio of the 'Little' Altan Tobchi in the TMSDL with keywords' highlights.…”

“…Manually annotated named entities, extracted named entities [14], manually compiled scholar's commentaries and interpretations [9], as well as digital texts of ancient Mongolian manuscripts [7], will be utilized for building a digital edition of ancient Mongolian manuscripts.…”

“…We improved Khaltarkhuu and Maeda's grammatical-rule-based approach [26][27][28] and proposed an 'ancient-to-modern information retrieval' method [7,29] by adding a dictionarybased query translation technique in order to consider cross-chronological differences in the writing systems of the ancient and modern Mongolian languages for accessing cross-chronological and cross-script ancient Mongolian documents by using a query in modern Mongolian in Cyrillic. To boost the quality of the translation, the 'ancient-to-modern information retrieval' approach [7,29] matches query terms to words in a dictionary. If no exact match is found, the grammatical-rule-based approach [26][27][28] is used.…”

Applying Text Encoding Initiative Guidelines to a Historical Record in Traditional Mongolian Script

“…We have been faced with the several challenges and demands while we were developing the traditional Mongolian script digital library (TMSDL) [1], which can be used to access ancient historical manuscripts written in traditional Mongolian script. In this paper, we discuss these demands and facing challenges for encoding Mongolian historical text.…”