lifeofacomputationallinguist

TET bindings for Python If you are about to extract text from digitised archives, you hope to receive clean XML files, because text extraction from XML files is an almost trivial undertaking. If you receive PDFs, on the other hand, things become a little more difficult. At least, OCR has been done already, so text recognition from pure images is done. For unknown reasons though, the output from the OCR has not been saved in an XML format, where you have the text in one file and the corresponding image (usually a tiff) in another file, but in a PDF where the text is saved in a stream alongside the image. Fortunately, there are libraries which allow you to extract this text stream from PDFs in an efficient manner. One such tool is PDFlib . Within the product range of PDFlib, you will find the Text and Image Extractor Toolkit, or TET for short. We have used the Python bindings to extract the text from the PDFs. A PDF of the first issue of the NZZ. But how to get the text out of ...

Problem statement Deerwester et al. address a common issue in information retrieval, which is the often unsatisfying recall due to the differences how documents are indexed and with what terms users would like to find them.  As such, synonymous query terms fail to retrieve a smiliar document and thus have a serious impact on recall. What is more, polysemy might return documents which are of no interest to the user, which severes precision. The authors point out three factors which are responsible for recent systems to fail in such tasks: Incomplete identification of index words: documents usually never contain all terms a user might query the data with. There is no way of dealing with polysemeous words. Independency assumption of word types   Their assumption is that there is an underlying latent semantic structure (in which terms might either refer to the document they appear in, or to the overall to...

Or shaping the future of newspaper archive digitisation I admit this is a rather promising title which raises many expectations. But this goes along the lines with the motto of the SNSF Sinergia programme, which enables researchers to produce breakthrough research. And we want to live up to this motto ;-). So, there we were, on the magnificent EPFL campus on the beautiful morning of the 24th of October, ready for a two day kick-off workshop. view from the EPFL campus This was in fact the first meet-up of the entire consortium, consisting of the research groups from EPFL, the C2DH lab from Luxembourg, the Institute of Computational Linguistics from the University of Zurich, the historians from the University of Lausanne, archivists from Le Temps, NZZ, the Swiss and Luxembourg National Library, the Swiss Economic Archives, the Archives from the Canton of Wallis, representatives from infoclio.ch, and other invited partners and friends. I hope I did not forget anybody :-). ...

The impresso-project Website is Online! Only a minor entry today: our project website is online! Feel free to browse and if you have questions, insights you want to share, or any suggestions, please let us know :-) www.impresso-project.ch

Data acquisition phase has started As holds true for every project, I assume, the data that will be worked with is of vital importance. Our aim in the impresso project is to digitise and process various newspapers from the late 18th to the 20th century (200 years in total) so that historians can explore the data in previously unseen and unknown ways. As such, we will provide new tools to do research in history, and who knows, maybe we will also take a leading role in revolutionising how historical research will be done in a few years ;-). But again, all this will not be able without any data. Already during the project application phase we contacted libraries in Switzerland and Luxembourg and asked them whether they have data available for our project. Many institutions gladly followed our call and committed themselves to assist us as good as they can. We are very happy that, for example, both the National Libraries of Luxembourg, as well as its Swiss counterpart are on board! T...

And off we go ... This being my first blog post which summarises a whole month, I think I'll touch upon some of the issues I had to deal with. I expect there will be some more blog entries following which will be dedicated to specific problems or insights. My aim is to blog like once a week, let's see where this will get us. It's been a little more than a month now since we could officially announce our SNF project as "on-going". More concretely, three institutions, namely the C²DH Lab at the University of Luxembourg, the DHLAB at the EPFL, and the Institute of Computational Linguistics at the University of Zurich set out to mine 200 years of newspaper data. We called the project impresso, which is the the perfect participle of the Latin word "imprimere", which means "to press", "to imprint", or "to stamp". Quite a fitting project name, I would say! So far, my role has been quite a modest one in this undertaking...