[Mova](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/enprag-2008-baron-vard2-tool-dealing-spelling-variation/) [home](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [docs](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/) / [papers](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/) / [English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/) / VARD 2: A tool for dealing with spelling variation in historical corpora # VARD 2: A tool for dealing with spelling variation in historical corpora **Authors:** Alistair Baron and Paul Rayson · **Year:** 2008 · **Venue:** Proceedings of the Postgraduate Conference in Corpus Linguistics, Aston University, Birmingham **Link:** [eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/41666](https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/41666) · **Licence:** Lancaster eprints author deposit, no open licence — summary only [**22** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/enprag-2008-baron-vard2-tool-dealing-spelling-variation/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we readProceedings of the Postgraduate Conference in Corpus Linguistics, Aston University, Birmingham, 22 May 2008 - [Publisher's page](https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/41666) - [PDF](https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/41666/1/BaronRaysonAston2008.pdf) **Authors (2)** 1. Alistair Baron 2. Paul Rayson Citations and author metrics from OpenAlex (); authors with the same name are not always told apart. ## What it is about Early Modern English has no standard spelling. One text can spell the same word in several ways, and modern taggers, frequency lists and concordances miss the variants. VARD 2 is a pre-processor. It marks each word that is not in a modern lexicon as a possible variant, and lists ranked modern candidates beside it, keeping the original spelling. Candidates come from three sources: a hand-made variant list, a modified SoundEx code, and letter replacement rules (doubled letters, u/v and i/j swaps, a final e). A candidate's confidence is the sum of the weights of the sources that found it, minus a small edit-distance term, and the weights change as each source proves useful. The paper is a tool description with no evaluation of its own; the results it quotes from earlier work show that modernised spelling raised CLAWS tagging accuracy on Shakespeare from 81.94% to 88.88%, and on the Lampeter corpus from 88.46% to 91.24%. ## Ideas - I1. `tools/gutenberg` and `en/src/emode.rs`: keep the raw spelling of a token and add its modern candidate, as the paper's XML output does with an attribute, so that `en` parses the modern form and the output still shows the original. The chapter says Mova reads modernised editions and does not normalise spelling; this step is for raw texts, such as early prints. Measure tag and parse accuracy on a hand-checked sample of raw tale text, with and without the step. - I2. A transparent candidate list in `en/src/emode.rs`: for an unknown word, give each candidate the rule that found it (doubling, u/v, final e, phonetic match), a fixed score, and a readable reason, so that `explain` can say why a form was read as a modern word. Use fixed weights in a fixed order, not weights learned during a run, so that two runs give the same output. Measure top-1 accuracy on 200 hand-labelled variants from one tale, run twice. - I3. Negative control: run the same step on modern text (EWT test). The paper gives no false-positive rate, so Mova must measure it. A step that changes many modern words is wrong, however well it does on old spelling. ## For Mova The chapter is [09. Early Modern and archaic forms](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/09-early-modern-and-archaic/), which says that spelling variants of early prints are not normalised yet. The code is `tools/gutenberg`, `en/src/emode.rs` and `en/src/tok.rs`. The paper has no open licence: take the idea and the measurement design, and write the rules and any variant lists ourselves, from our own texts. ## Cite The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ``` @inproceedings{baron2008vard, title = {{VARD 2: A tool for dealing with spelling variation in historical corpora}}, author = {Baron, Alistair and Rayson, Paul}, booktitle = {Proceedings of the Postgraduate Conference in Corpus Linguistics, Aston University, Birmingham, 22 May 2008}, year = {2008}, url = {https://eprints.lancs.ac.uk/id/eprint/41666} } ``` - [← previous LinGO Redwoods: A Rich and Dynamic Treebank for HPSG](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/enprag-2004-oepen-lingo-redwoods-rich-dynamic-treebank/) - [next → The CommitmentBank: Investigating projection in naturally occurring discourse](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/enprag-2019-marneffe-commitmentbank-investigating-projection-naturally/) - [↑ back to English](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/en/) ## References 19 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. The VARD 2 tool is designed with EModE spelling variation in mind; however its learning capabilities and flexibility allow the tool to be used with potentially any form of spelling variation. This is an area which requires further investigation. VARD 2 is still under development and various improvements are planned for the near future. Evaluation of the tool’s accuracy (Rayson et al, forthcoming) and its effect on part-of-speech tagging (Rayson et al, 2007) has already taken place. With future improvements to the tool, further evaluation of its accuracy, usability and effect on corpus linguistic tools will be necessary. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=The+VARD+2+tool+is+designed+with+EModE+spelling+variation+in+mind%3B+however+its+learning+capabilities+and+flexibility+allow+the+tool+to+be+used+with+potentially+any+form+of+spelling+variation%2E+This+is+) 2. References Archer, D., McEnery, T., Rayson, P. and Hardie, A. (2003). Developing an automated semantic analysis system for Early Modern English. In Archer, D, Rayson, P., Wilson, A. and McEnery, T. (eds.). Proceedings of the Corpus Linguistics 2003 conference. UCREL technical paper number 16. UCREL, Lancaster University, pp. 22 - 31. [find](https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=References+Archer%2C+D%2E%2C+McEnery%2C+T%2E%2C+Rayson%2C+P%2E+and+Hardie%2C+A%2E+%282003%29%2E+Developing+an+automated+semantic+analysis+system+for+Early+Modern+English%2E+In+Archer%2C+D%2C+Rayson%2C+P%2E%2C+Wilson%2C+A%2E+and+McEnery%2C+T%2E+%28e) 3. Culpeper, J. and Kytö, M. (1997). Towards a corpus of dialogues, 1550-1750. In Ramisch, H. and Wynne, K. (eds.). Language in Time and Space. Studies in Honour of Wolfgang Viereck on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday (Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik - Beihefte, Heft 97). pp 60-73. Franz Steiner Verlag, Stuttgart. 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