Is text normalization relevant for classifying medieval charters?
Abstract
This study examines the impact of historical text normalization on the classification of medieval charters, specifically focusing on document dating and locating. Using a data set of Middle High German charters from a digital archive, we evaluate various classifiers, including traditional and transformer-based models, with and without normalization. Our results indicate that the given normalization minimally improves locating tasks but reduces accuracy for dating, implying that original texts contain crucial features that normalization may obscure. We find that support vector machines and gradient boosting outperform other models, questioning the efficiency of transformers for this use case. Results suggest a selective approach to historical text normalization, emphasizing the significance of preserving some textual characteristics that are critical for classification tasks in document analysis.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2408.16446,
title = {Is text normalization relevant for classifying medieval charters?},
author = {Florian Atzenhofer-Baumgartner and Tamás Kovács},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.16446},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
This preprint has not undergone peer review or any post-submission improvements or corrections. The Version of Record of this contribution is published in LNCS volume 15178 and is available online at https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-72440-4_12