The ARTFL Team discusses current research, recent experiments, and ongoing software development.
Recent developments in machine translation and sequence alignment now offer new possibilities for the systematic comparison of digital texts across languages. The following post outlines some recent experimental work in leveraging these new techniques in an effort to reduce the "arduous toil" of textual comparison, giving some preliminary examples of the kinds of results that can be achieved, and providing some cursory observations on the advantages and limitations of such systems for automatic text analys
Our two comparison datasets are the ARTFL Encyclopédie ( v. 1117 ) and the recently digitised ARTFL edition of the 1741 Chambers' Cyclopaedia ( link ). The 1741 edition was selected as it was one of the likely sources for the translation original project and we were able to work from high quality pages images provided by the University of Chicago Library [4]. In a nutshell, our approach was to generate a machine translation of all of the Cyclopaedia articles into French and then use ARTFL's Text-PAIR se