Linguistically-enhanced search over an open diachronic corpus

Abstract

The BVC section of the impact-es diachronic corpus of historical Spanish compiles 86 books —containing approximately 2 million words. About 27% of the words —providing a representative coverage of the most frequent word forms— have been annotated with their lemma, part of speech, and modern equivalent following the Text Encoding Initiative guidelines. We describe how this type of annotation can be exploited to provide linguistically-enhanced search over historical documents. The advanced search supports queries whose search terms can be a combination of surface forms, lemmata, parts of speech and modern forms of historical variants.