The Latest Prague Contributions to Written Cultural Heritage Processing

* The following text has been originally published in the Proceedings of the Language Recourses and Evaluation Conference held in Lisbon, Portugal, 2004, under the title of "Towards Intelligent Written Cultural Heritage Processing - Lexical processing". I present here a revised contribution of the aforementioned paper and I add here the latest efforts done in the Center for Computational Linguistic in Prague in the field under discussion.

This work presents a software package ACT (Annotated Corpora of Text) for lexical and corpus processing of European written cultural sources (currently used for processing of mediaeval Slavonic manuscripts). I use ACT as a contribution towards a contextual and intelligent heritage Information Technology framework. The software is suitable for capturing characteristics of old written sources including rich language variability on word and sentential level. It is not the word-form, but its understandings/interpretations that become central processing units, which can be assigned morphology distinctions, head-words (including recensional), translation equivalents; these interpretations can be joined in multi-word units or assigned correlation to other sources. The whole annotation process is automated and individual sorting orders and morphology tags structures can easily be defined. ACT incorporates modules for: complex searches on one or more sources, creation of various ready-to-use documents, web text and image access, incorporation of lexical card-files into a corpus, and text-from-card-files reconstruction.