Vladimir Neumann

Vladimir Neumann studied Slavic Studies in Bonn and received his doctorate in Berlin. He currently works as a subject specialist for Slavistics at the Berlin State Library, where he has been involved for over 20 years not only in the development of the East European collection, but also in the continuous expansion of Slavistik-Portal, which serves as a central hub for scholarly information in the field. In recent years, his work has focused on the conversion of all German-language and international Slavic bibliographies into database format, the digitization and OCR-based indexing of the library’s collection of Church Slavonic prints (Kirchenslavica Digital, 17th to 19th century), and the processing and transformation of historical multilingual Slavic dictionaries (MultiSlavDict). The latter project currently comprises around a dozen sources with more than 300,000 lemmas and approximately five million word forms. Vladimir Neumann also regularly offers online training courses at the Berlin State Library on topics such as Natural Language Processing, text corpora in Slavistics, and OCR techniques for Church Slavonic sources.

Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin
Germany

Effektiver Einsatz von NLP-Methoden am Beispiel des Codex Suprasliensis

Ефективно използване на методите на NLP въз основа на пример от Codex Suprasliensis

  • Summary/Abstract

    The integration of computational methods in historical philology is becoming increasingly essential, yet challenges persist in harmonizing linguistic and technical aspects of text analysis. This study presents a comprehensive and methodologically transparent use case that documents the entire computational philological workflow– from data acquisition and modeling to analysis and visualization–in a structured and reproducible manner. Using the Codex Suprasliensis, one of the most significant Old Slavic manuscripts, as a case study, we demonstrate how modern Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, particularly the Stanza library for morphosyntactic annotation and DataFrame-based corpus structuring, can facilitate the exploration of historical textual corpora. A special emphasis is placed on benchmarking Stanza’s performance in processing Old Church Slavonic, evaluating its segmentation, tagging, and parsing accuracy against existing Gold Standard datasets. Additionally, we discuss the role of DataFrame-based modeling in ensuring an efficient and transparent structuring of linguistic data, allowing for flexible transformations and reproducible analyses. To support further research and methodological validation, all functional and extensively annotated scripts–including the complete NLP pipeline–are permanently provided via the GitHub platform of the Berlin State Library. The findings highlight the importance of structured corpus processing in computational philology and contribute to the ongoing refinement of NLP methodologies for historical languages.

    Subject: e-Scripta

Deep Mining of the Collection of Old Prints ‘Kirchenslavica digital’ Scripta & e-Scripta vol. 21, 2021 floyd Fri, 11/19/2021 - 16:15
Цифровизиране с извличане на семантични данни на сбирката от старопечатни книги Kirchenslavica digital
The article deals with various efforts of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin (SBB) to make its collection of about 250 Church-Slavic prints from the 17th to the 19th century accessible in terms of content using the methods of modern information technology from the Digital Humanities sector. The focus is on full-text indexing of the heterogeneous Church Slavonic prints using HTR+ language models from the programme Transkribus. Depending on whether they are Moscow, Kiev or Old Believer prints, these models require different approaches and corresponding adaptations that take into account the printing area and printing period. Prints such as Kirillova kniga (1644) or Gistorija Ioanna Damaskina (1637) and many others are processed at large scale, whereby the developed character recognition models are constantly refined by training new verified data. The full texts generated in this way are permanently stored in various XML formats (ALTO, PAGE) on the one hand in a central repository for subsequent use, and on the other hand they are merged with original digital copies in the IIIF-compatible Digital Library of the SBB. As a further element, the Church Slavonic full texts will be indexed using special SOLR analyzers for efficient searches (Tokinising, Translit, N-Grams) and made searchable in subject portals (including the Slavistik-Portal) using modern text-image web design. Subject: Digital humanities Keywords: CHURCH SLAVONIC Old prints Transkribus; automatic transcription model training data processing and retrieval
Subscribe to Vladimir Neumann