Linguistic and orthographical classic Portuguese variants. Challenges for NLP

Abstract

In recent times, it was made a great investment in transfer from physical ancient Portuguese texts to digital support. This support transfer allows not only the access to the texts, bringing them to the public in general, but also the possibility of texts to be readable and processed by machines. NLP tools are addressed, mainly, to contemporary Portuguese and the application of NLP to classic texts has several difficulties. The elaboration of big lexical corpora of forms previous to modern Portuguese is an opportunity for multidisciplinary field of studies allowing the enlargement of linguistic studies and also the possibility of obtaining, by NLP, validated corpora, collections and ontologies, that can be input in NLP tools for ancient Portuguese texts. In this work we will present, briefly, the problem of lexical variation of forms in processing classic Portuguese texts, the challenges that emerge from them and future perspectives of work.