VARD2 : a tool for dealing with spelling variation in historical corpora

Abstract

When applying corpus linguistic techniques to historical corpora, the corpus researcher should be cautious about the results obtained. Corpus annotation techniques such as part of speech tagging, trained for modern languages, are particularly vulnerable to inaccuracy due to vocabulary and grammatical shifts in language over time. Basic corpus retrieval techniques such as frequency profiling and concordancing will also be affected, in addition to the more sophisticated