The BDCamões Collection of Portuguese Literary Documents: a Research Resource for Digital Humanities and Language Technology

Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), pages 849–854 Marseille, 11–16 May 2020 c⃝ European Language Resources Association (ELRA), licensed under CC-BY-NC 849 The BDCam˜oes Collection of Portuguese Literary Documents: a Research Resource for Language Technology and Digital Humanities Sara Grilo1, M´arcia Bolrinha1, Jo˜ao Silva1, Rui Vaz2, Ant´onio Branco1 2Instituto Cam˜oes I.P. Av. da Liberdade 270, 1250-149 Lisboa, Portugal rvaz@camoes.mne.pt 1University of Lisbon NLX—Natural Language and Speech Group, Department of Informatics Faculdade de Ciˆencias Campo Grande, 1749-016 Lisboa, Portugal {srgrilo, msbolrinha, jsilva, antonio.branco}@di.fc.ul.pt Abstract This paper presents the BDCam˜oes Collection of Portuguese Literary Documents, a new corpus of literary texts written in Portuguese that in its inaugural version includes close to 4 million words from over 200 complete documents from 83 authors in 14 genres, covering a time span from the 16th to the 21st century, and adhering to different orthographic conventions. Many of the texts in the corpus have also been automatically parsed with state-of-the-art language processing tools, forming the BDCam˜oes Treebank subcorpus. This set of characteristics makes of BDCam˜oes an invaluable resource for research in language technology (e.g. authorship detection, genre classification, etc.) and in language science and digital humanities (e.g. comparative literature, diachronic linguistics, etc.). Keywords: Portuguese, corpus, language technology, digital humanities, literary studies, history, diachronic linguistics, cultural landmarks, cultural heritage. 1. Introduction This paper introduces the BDCam˜oes Collection of Por- tuguese Literary Documents,1 a new language resource that is suitable for the scientific study and the technological preparation of the Portuguese language. This corpus is a collection of written documents with close to 4 million words from over 200 documents. In contrast to many existing corpora aimed at primarily supporting the development and testing of natural language processing tools and applications, BDCam˜oes has a number of less common, very interesting set of characteristics that together turn it into an invaluable research resource, com- plementing other related resources. It is made of complete documents, rather than of fragments; it is made of high quality, carefully edited texts, rather than of content that has been (semi-)automatically scrapped from web pages; it contains texts from a wide time span ranging from the 16th century to the 21st century, rather than only from re- cent times, or only from old times; it is made mostly of lit- erary texts, rather than from the more usual, easily available domains of news articles, legal documents, etc.; it includes texts of different genres, such as novels, chronicles, poems and short stories, among others; it contains texts from a number of different authors, in different styles, rather than originating from a single author or adhering to a uniform style; its documents have well identified authors, rather than lacking clear authorship; many of its texts are out- standing landmarks of culture expressed in Portuguese lan- guage and/or are of high historical relevance (e.g. the first 1The acronym BDCam˜oes relates to the Portuguese designa- tion Colec¸˜ao de Documentos Liter´arios em L´ıngua Portuguesa na Biblioteca Digital do Cam˜oes I.P. theater plays written …

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