Automatic disambiguation of Latin abbreviations in early modern texts for humanities digital libraries

Abstract

Early modern books written in Latin contain many abbreviations of common words that are derived from earlier manuscript practice. While these abbreviations are usually easily deciphered by a reader well-versed in Latin, they pose technical problems for full text digitization: they are difficult to OCR or have typed and - if they are not expanded correctly - they limit the effectiveness of information retrieval and reading support tools in the digital library. We describe a method for the automatic expansion and disambiguation of these abbreviations.