Grant awarded!

We are very pleased to announce that eTRAP has been awarded a 20,000€ grant from the University of Göttingen for a six-month pilot project. The project, TrAiN (Tracing Authorship in Noise), seeks to investigate the complex relation between noisy OCR’d data and automatic text analyses. In particular, we will investigate and attempt to define the maximum noise threshold that will allow us to adequately conduct authorship and text reuse analyses on a number of texts selected for this study. Our research questions: at which point does OCR/HTR noise interfere with the automatic identification of stable linguistic and stylistic markers? What is the minimum amount of noise we need to correct?

The project includes a joint research workshop with stylometry experts to optimise existing algorithms, and to exchange ideas and knowledge.

Congratulations, team!

Project Co-PIs: Marco Büchler, Greta Franzini, Emily Franzini, Gabriela Rotari, Maria Moritz.

eTRAP’s article “Sentence Shortening via Morpho-Syntactic Annotated Data in Historical Language Learning” authored by Maria Moritz, Barbara Pavlek, Greta Franzini and Gregory Crane, is now published in the current issue of the ACM Journal on Computing and Cultural Heritage (JOCCH). The work was supported by the Federal Ministry of Education (BMBF) and the European Social Fund (ESF). Here is the abstract:

We present an approach to shorten Ancient Greek sentences by using morpho-syntactic information attached to each word in a sentence. This work underpins the content of our eLearning application, AncientGeek, whose unique teaching technique draws from primary Greek sources. By applying a technique that skips the clausal dependents of a main verb, we reached a well-formed rate of 89% of the sentences.