Juzek, Tom; Fischer, Stefan; Krielke, Marie-Pauline; Degaetano-Ortlieb, Stefania; Teich, Elke
Challenges of parsing a historical corpus of Scientific English
Historical Corpora and Variation (Book of Abstracts), Cagliari, Italy, 2019.
In this contribution, we outline our experiences with syntactically parsing a diachronic historical corpus. We report on how errors like OCR inaccuracies, end-of-sentence inaccuracies, etc. propagate bottom-up and how we approach such errors by building on existing machine learning approaches for error correction. The Royal Society Corpus (RSC; Kermes et al. 2016) is a collection of scientific text from 1665 to 1869 and contains ca. 10 000 documents and 30 million tokens. Using the RSC, we wish to describe and
model how syntactic complexity changes as Scientific English of the late modern period develops. Our focus is on how common measures of syntactic complexity, e.g. length in tokens, embedding depth, and number of dependants, relate to estimates of information content. Our hypothesis is that Scientific English develops towards the use of shorter sentences with fewer clausal embeddings and increasingly complex noun phrases over time, in order to accommodate an expansion on the lexical level.