Manual and semi-automatic normalization of historical spelling – case studies from Early New High German

This paper presents work on manual and semi-automatic normalization of historical language data. We first address the guide-lines that we use for mapping historical to modern word forms. The guidelines dis-tinguish between normalization (preferring forms close to the original) and moderniza-tion (preferring forms close to modern lan-guage). Average inter-annotator agreement is 88.38 % on a set of data from Early New High German. We then present Norma, a semi-automatic normalization tool. It in-tegrates different modules (lexicon lookup, rewrite rules) for normalizing words in a