arXiv subjects

Eetu Mäkelä

Publications and source records attributed to Eetu Mäkelä.

7 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Pair-Level Essay-Scale Republication and Reuse from Fragmented Historical Text Reuse: A Workflow Study on Eighteenth-Century Books and Newspapers

This paper addresses the recovery of essay-scale republication and reuse from fragmented text-reuse evidence, a setting whose central challenge is pair-level evidence consolidation and not fragment retrieval alone. The study focuses on a candidate set centered on essays by eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher David Hume, spanning books from ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collections Online) and historical newspapers. Because the input consists of fragmented reuse hits instead of clean document pairs, and positive coverage is inherently incomplete, we formulate the task as pair-level evidence consolidation into plausible transmission relations and compare three methodological families: a staged rule-based workflow, baselines (a decision tree and two direct LLM settings), and automated rule adaptation. On labeled ECCO--ECCO slices, pair-level feature aggregation alone already reaches 0.948 F1 on the main labeled slice, while the final workflow gives the strongest overall precision-recall trade-off among the tested rule stages. On the full ECCO--ECCO candidate universe, direct LLM baselines flag up to 14,886 pairs as reprints compared to 771 for the final workflow, behaving in this direct-prompt setup as high-recall candidate expanders rather than precision-controlled deployment classifiers. On ECCO--Newspaper, manual audit confirms all 176 predicted positives as genuine cases of republication or reuse, while issue duplication and source-side multiplicity reveal additional provenance structure. Under incomplete ground truth, auditable pair-level evidence consolidation provides a practical way to produce compact candidate spaces for historical inspection.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Error Patterns in Historical OCR: A Comparative Analysis of TrOCR and a Vision-Language Model

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) of eighteenth-century printed texts remains challenging due to degraded print quality, archaic glyphs, and non-standardized orthography. Although transformer-based OCR systems and Vision-Language Models (VLMs) achieve strong aggregate accuracy, metrics such as Character Error Rate (CER) and Word Error Rate (WER) provide limited insight into their reliability for scholarly use. We compare a dedicated OCR transformer (TrOCR) and a general-purpose Vision-Language Model (Qwen) on line-level historical English texts using length-weighted accuracy metrics and hypothesis driven error analysis. While Qwen achieves lower CER/WER and greater robustness to degraded input, it exhibits selective linguistic regularization and orthographic normalization that may silently alter historically meaningful forms. TrOCR preserves orthographic fidelity more consistently but is more prone to cascading error propagation. Our findings show that architectural inductive biases shape OCR error structure in systematic ways. Models with similar aggregate accuracy can differ substantially in error locality, detectability, and downstream scholarly risk, underscoring the need for architecture-aware evaluation in historical digitization workflows.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2026

Detecting Latin in Historical Books with Large Language Models: A Multimodal Benchmark

This paper presents a novel task of extracting low-resourced and noisy Latin fragments from mixed-language historical documents with varied layouts. We benchmark and evaluate the performance of large foundation models against a multimodal dataset of 724 annotated pages. The results demonstrate that reliable Latin detection with contemporary zero-shot models is achievable, yet these models lack a functional comprehension of Latin. This study establishes a comprehensive baseline for processing Latin within mixed-language corpora, supporting quantitative analysis in intellectual history and historical linguistics. Both the dataset and code are available at https://github.com/COMHIS/EACL26-detect-latin.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Optimizing a Data Science System for Text Reuse Analysis

Text reuse is a methodological element of fundamental importance in humanities research: pieces of text that re-appear across different documents, verbatim or paraphrased, provide invaluable information about the historical spread and evolution of ideas. Large modern digitized corpora enable the joint analysis of text collections that span entire centuries and the detection of large-scale patterns, impossible to detect with traditional small-scale analysis. For this opportunity to materialize, it is necessary to develop efficient data science systems that perform the corresponding analysis tasks. In this paper, we share insights from ReceptionReader, a system for analyzing text reuse in large historical corpora. The system is built upon billions of instances of text reuses from large digitized corpora of 18th-century texts. Its main functionality is to perform downstream text reuse analysis tasks, such as finding reuses that stem from a given article or identifying the most reused quotes from a set of documents, with each task expressed as a database query. For the purposes of the paper, we discuss the related design choices including various database normalization levels and query execution frameworks, such as distributed data processing (Apache Spark), indexed row store engine (MariaDB Aria), and compressed column store engine (MariaDB Columnstore). Moreover, we present an extensive evaluation with various metrics of interest (latency, storage size, and computing costs) for varying workloads, and we offer insights from the trade-offs we observed and the choices that emerged as optimal in our setting. In summary, our results show that (1) for the workloads that are most relevant to text-reuse analysis, the MariaDB Aria framework emerges as the overall optimal choice, (2) big data processing (Apache Spark) is irreplaceable for all processing stages of the system's pipeline.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2023

Reception Reader: Exploring Text Reuse in Early Modern British Publications

The Reception Reader is a web tool for studying text reuse in the Early English Books Online (EEBO-TCP) and Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) data. Users can: 1) explore a visual overview of the reception of a work, or its incoming connections, across time based on shared text segments, 2) interactively survey the details of connected documents, and 3) examine the context of reused text for "close reading". We show examples of how the tool streamlines research and exploration tasks, and discuss the utility and limitations of the user interface along with its current data sources.

cs.DL↗

arXiv2021

From Plenipotentiary to Puddingless: Users and Uses of New Words in Early English Letters

We study neologism use in two samples of early English correspondence, from 1640--1660 and 1760--1780. Of especial interest are the early adopters of new vocabulary, the social groups they represent, and the types and functions of their neologisms. We describe our computer-assisted approach and note the difficulties associated with massive variation in the corpus. Our findings include that while male letter-writers tend to use neologisms more frequently than women, the eighteenth century seems to have provided more opportunities for women and the lower ranks to participate in neologism use as well. In both samples, neologisms most frequently occur in letters written between close friends, which could be due to this less stable relationship triggering more creative language use. In the seventeenth-century sample, we observe the influence of the English Civil War, while the eighteenth-century sample appears to reflect the changing functions of letter-writing, as correspondence is increasingly being used as a tool for building and maintaining social relationships in addition to exchanging information.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2016

Old Content and Modern Tools - Searching Named Entities in a Finnish OCRed Historical Newspaper Collection 1771-1910

Named Entity Recognition (NER), search, classification and tagging of names and name like frequent informational elements in texts, has become a standard information extraction procedure for textual data. NER has been applied to many types of texts and different types of entities: newspapers, fiction, historical records, persons, locations, chemical compounds, protein families, animals etc. In general a NER system's performance is genre and domain dependent and also used entity categories vary (Nadeau and Sekine, 2007). The most general set of named entities is usually some version of three partite categorization of locations, persons and organizations. In this paper we report first large scale trials and evaluation of NER with data out of a digitized Finnish historical newspaper collection Digi. Experiments, results and discussion of this research serve development of the Web collection of historical Finnish newspapers. Digi collection contains 1,960,921 pages of newspaper material from years 1771-1910 both in Finnish and Swedish. We use only material of Finnish documents in our evaluation. The OCRed newspaper collection has lots of OCR errors; its estimated word level correctness is about 70-75 % (Kettunen and Pääkkönen, 2016). Our principal NER tagger is a rule-based tagger of Finnish, FiNER, provided by the FIN-CLARIN consortium. We show also results of limited category semantic tagging with tools of the Semantic Computing Research Group (SeCo) of the Aalto University. Three other tools are also evaluated briefly. This research reports first published large scale results of NER in a historical Finnish OCRed newspaper collection. Results of the research supplement NER results of other languages with similar noisy data.

cs.CL↗