Literary Onomastics and Language Technology

Abstract

In this chapter, the authors describe the development and application of language technology for intelligent information access to the content of digitized cultural heritage collections in the form of Swedish classical literary works. This technology offers sophisticated and flexible support functions to literary scholars and researchers. The authors focus on one kind of text processing technology (named entity recognition) and one research field (literary onomastics), but try to argue that the techniques involved are quite general and can be further developed in a number of directions. This way, the authors aim at supporting the users of digitized literature collections with tools that enable semantic search, browsing and indexing of texts. In this sense, the authors offer new ways for exploring the large volumes of literary texts being made available through national cultural heritage digitization projects. Language technology; Computational linguistics; Natural language processing; Literary onomastics; Named entity recognition; Corpus linguistics; Corpus annotation; Digital resources; Text technology; Cultural heritage