A Text Analy+c Approach to Rural and Urban Legal Histories
Adam Wyner -‐ School of Natural and Compu+ng Sciences
Jackson Armstrong and Andrew MacKillop -‐ School of Divinity, History, and Philosophy
Phil Astley – Aberdeen City & Aberdeenshire Archives
Dot.Rural February 21, 2014 Aberdeen, Scotland
Adam Wyner Department of Compu+ng Science
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• Argumenta+on schemes – paOerns of defeasible reasoning, e.g. prac+cal reasoning or expert tes+mony.
• Abstract argumenta+on – represen+ng arguments as graphs. • Applica+ons of computa+onal argumenta+on for decision
support, e.g. policy consulta+ons or consumer decision making.
• Legal informa+cs -‐ legal case-‐based reasoning with argumenta+on.
• Text-‐mining for knowledge extrac+on from corpora.
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Project Specifics
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• Collabora+on between Compu+ng, History, and Aberdeen Council.
• Funded by University of Aberdeen's dot.rural partnership resource for digital economy
• About £53k for six months.
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Star+ng Point Aberdeen Burgh Records
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Source Material
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• Records from 1398 to present.
• Variety of legal informa+on.
• A por+on is a UNESCO listed cultural artefact.
• WriOen in La+n and Middle Scots.
• 100 pages have been transcribed.
Source Material
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Database Search
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Search for -‐ Names -‐ Gender -‐ Office -‐ Place Name -‐ Date -‐ link to image -‐ link to transcrip+on -‐ link to transla+on
Transla+ons
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• 3 February 1531
• 81-‐1 Opening of bailie court session presided by David Anderson, Master Andrew Tilliedaff, Henry Irvine and Andrew Menzies, bailies.
• 81-‐2 John Armour the younger has given sufficient proof that John Henderson, cordiner, owed him a buckler sword belonging to Robert RaOray.
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Project Development
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Content extrac+on to support legal historical research
and presenta+on of archival materials.
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Technical Objec+ves Text Analy?cs
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• To apply automa+c text analy+c tools to annotate and enrich transcribed, machine-‐readable Aberdeen Burgh Records from 1530-‐1531 (output of RIISS Project).
• Deep seman?c, conceptual annota?on. • To query, extract, link, and reuse the corpus content. • Advantages: flexible, extensible, reapplicable, fast, efficient, mul+-‐dimensional.
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Historical Objec+ves Digital Humani?es
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• To carry out deep conceptual analysis based on textual data: – Named en++es, rela+ons, legal roles, jurisdic+ons.... – Gramma+cal informa+on for La+n and Middle Scots. – Trace social/legal networks. – Follow the evolu+on of social/legal concepts. – Highlight historical resource management and conflict. – Who, what, when, where, why, how, what connec+ons...?
• To address the ques+ons using seman+c search within and across texts and in textual context.
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Council and Archivists' Objec+ves Public Engagement
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• To increase public access to archival materials for tourism, educa+on, business, and research.
• To draw out, augment, and link the content of the materials.
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Text Analysis
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• We focus on enriching the source text with annota+ons in order to facilitate seman+c search.
• General Architecture for Text Engineering (GATE) -‐ open source framework which supports plug-‐in NLP components to process a corpus of text.
• Human visible and machine-‐readable formats. • Indexa+on and search with respect to annota+ons.
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Annota+ons -‐ Human View
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Annota+ons -‐ Machine View (XML)
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Search for Rela+ons
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Challenges
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• Reuse and develop La+n and Middle Scots NLP tools such as dic+onaries, parsers, grammars, etc.
• Determine how to process irregulari+es. • Structure the terminology into concepts. • Iden+fy and select external, linkable content. • Demonstrate use of text analysis for legal historical analysis and for public access.
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Beyond and Contact
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• Link to external web resources. • Provide a web-‐based interac+ve interface.
• Create more projects. Link to more projects. • Adam Wyner (PI) – [email protected]
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