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Information Retrieval and Visualization for the Historical Domain

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Language Technology for Cultural Heritage

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Abstract

Working with large and unstructured collections of historical documents is a challenging task for historians. Despite the recent growth in the volume of digitized historical data, available collections are rarely accompanied by computational tools that significantly facilitate this task.We address this shortage by proposing a visualization method for document collections that focuses on graphical representation of similarities between documents. The strength of the similarities is measured according to the overlap of historically significant information such as named entities,or the overlap of general vocabulary. Similarity strengths are then encoded in the edges of a graph.The graph provides visual structure, revealing interpretable clusters and links between documents that are otherwise difficult to establish. We implement the idea of similarity graphs within an information retrieval system supported by an interactive graphical user interface. The system allows querying the database, visualizing the results and browsing the collection in an effective and intuitive way. Our aproach can be easy adapted and extended to collections of documents in other domains.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the following people at Saarland University:

 ∙ Caroline Sporleder, for her dedicated guidance and valuable advice on the project.

 ∙ Martin Schreiber, for his feedback on the system from the user perspective.

Michal Richter has been supported by grant ME838 of the Czech Republic Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Saarland University, 66041, Saarbrücken, Germany

    Yevgeni Berzak, Michal Richter, Carsten Ehrler & Todd Shore

Authors
  1. Yevgeni Berzak
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  2. Michal Richter
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  3. Carsten Ehrler
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  4. Todd Shore
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yevgeni Berzak .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. , Computational Linguistics / MMCI, Saarland University, Saarbrücken, 66041, Germany

    Caroline Sporleder

  2. Fac. Humanities, Tilburg University, Tilburg, Netherlands

    Antal van den Bosch

  3. Tilburg School for Humanities, Tilburg Center for Cognition and Communi, University of Tilburg, Tilburg, 5000, Netherlands

    Kalliopi Zervanou

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Berzak, Y., Richter, M., Ehrler, C., Shore, T. (2011). Information Retrieval and Visualization for the Historical Domain. In: Sporleder, C., van den Bosch, A., Zervanou, K. (eds) Language Technology for Cultural Heritage. Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20227-8_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20227-8_11

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-20226-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-20227-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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