A Cross-Language Approach to Historic Document Retrieval

Our cultural heritage, as preserved in libraries, archives and museums, is made up of documents written many centuries ago. Largescale digitization initiatives make these documents available to nonexpert users through digital libraries and vertical search engines. For a user, querying a historic document collection may be a disappointing experience: queries involving modern words may not be very effective for retrieving documents that contain many historic terms. We propose a cross-language approach to historic document retrieval, and investigate (1) the automatic construction of translation resources for historic languages, and (2) the retrieval of historic documents using cross-language information retrieval techniques. Our experimental evidence is based on a collection of 17th century Dutch documents and a set of 25 known-item topics in modern Dutch. Our main findings are as follows: First, we are able to automatically construct rules for modernizing historic language based on compa...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: DAGSTUHL
• Authors: Jaap Kamps, Marijn Koolen, Frans Adriaans, Maarten de Rijke
• Keywords: DAGSTUHL 2006, DAGSTUHL 2007, Historic, Historic Documents, Historic Language