MANUSCRIPTS AND MACHINES: THE AUTOMATIC REPLACEMENT OF SPELLING VARIANTS IN A PORTUGUESE HISTORICAL CORPUS

摘要

The CARDS-FLY project aims to collect and transcribe a diverse sample of historical personal letters from the 16th to 20th century in a digital format to create a linguistic resource for the historical study of the Portuguese language and society. The letters were written by people from all social layers of society and their historical, social and pragmatic contexts are documented in the digital format. Here we study one particular aspect of this collection, namely the spelling variation. Furthermore, on the basis of this analysis, we improved a statistical spelling normalisation tool that we aim to use to automatically normalise the spelling in the full collection of digitised letters.