More and more historical texts are becoming available in digital form. Digitization of paper
documents is motivated by the aim of preserving cultural heritage and making it more accessible
both to laypeople and scholars. As digital images cannot be searched for text digitization
projects increasingly strive to create digital text which can be searched and otherwise
automatically processed in addition to facsimiles. Indeed the emerging field of digital
humanities heavily relies on the availability of digital text for its studies. Together with
the increasing availability of historical texts in digital form there is a growing interest in
applying natural language processing (NLP) methods and tools to historical texts. However the
specific linguistic properties of historical texts -- the lack of standardized orthography in
particular -- pose special challenges for NLP. This book aims to give an introduction to NLP
for historical texts and an overview of the state of the art in this field. The book starts
with an overview of methods for the acquisition of historical texts (scanning and OCR)
discusses text encoding and annotation schemes and presents examples of corpora of historical
texts in a variety of languages. The book then discusses specific methods such as creating
part-of-speech taggers for historical languages or handling spelling variation. A final chapter
analyzes the relationship between NLP and the digital humanities. Certain recently emerging
textual genres such as SMS social media and chat messages or newsgroup and forum postings
share a number of properties with historical texts for example nonstandard orthography and
grammar and profuse use of abbreviations. The methods and techniques required for the
effective processing of historical texts are thus also of interest for research in other
domains. Table of Contents: Introduction NLP and Digital Humanities Spelling in Historical
Texts Acquiring Historical Texts Text Encoding and Annotation Schemes Handling Spelling
Variation NLP Tools for Historical Languages Historical Corpora Conclusion Bibliography
