Automatic Extraction of Linguistic Data from Digitized Documents

This paper presents a system for automatically extracting linguistic data from digitized linguistic documents using a combination of existing software packages and custom scripts. The system is designed to leverage existing resources in online digital libraries in order to bootstrap the creation of large, multi-lingual linguistic corpora, which can then be used to conduct data-driven experimental research into cross-linguistic or universal linguistic phenomena. The system identifies instances of foreign-language text accompanied by reference-language translations within the text of printed books that have been scanned into digital format, and extracts these to produce a parallel corpus of example sentences. While the system achieves a high precision on predicting foreign text, its accuracy overall is low, and directions for improvement and future work are identified.