Document in Context of its Time (DICT): Providing Temporal Context to Support Analysis of Past Documents

Abstract

Old documents tend to be difficult to be analyzed and understood, not only for average users but oftentimes for professionals as well. This is due to the context shift, vocabulary evolution and, in general, the lack of precise knowledge about the writing styles in the past. We propose a concept of positioning document in the context of its time, and develop an interactive system to support such an objective. Our system helps users to know whether the vocabulary used by an author in the past were frequent at the time of text creation, whether the author used anachronisms or neologisms, and so on. It also enables detecting terms in text that underwent considerable semantic change and provides more information on the nature of such change. Overall, the proposed tool offers additional knowledge on the writing style and vocabulary choice in documents by drawing from data collected at the time of their creation or at other user-specified time.