TiCClops

TICCL (Text Induced Corpus Clean-up) is a system that is designed to search a corpus for all existing variants of (potentially) all words occurring in the corpus. This corpus can be one text, or several, in one or more directories, located on one or more machines. TICCL creates word frequency lists, listing for each word type how often the word occurs in the corpus. These frequencies of the normalized word forms are the sum of the frequencies of the actual word forms found in the corpus. TICCL is a system that is intended to detect and correct typographical errors (misprints) and OCR errors (optical character recognition) in texts. When books or other texts are scanned from paper by a machine, that then turns these scans, i.e. images, into digital text files, errors occur. For instance, the letter combination `in' can be read as `m', and so the word `regeering' is incorrectly reproduced as `regeermg'. TICCL can be used to detect these errors and to suggest a correct form. Text-Induced Corpus Clean-up (TICCL) was developed first as a prototype at the request of the Koninklijke Bibliotheek - The Hague (KB) and reworked into a production tool according to KB specifications (currently at production version 2.0) mainly during the second half of 2008. It is a fully functional environment for processing possibly very large corpora in order to largely remove the undesirable lexical variation in them. It has provisions for various input and output formats, is flexible and robust and has very high recall and acceptable precision. As a spelling variation detection system it is to the developer’s knowledge unique in making principled use of the input text as possible source for target output canonical forms. As such it is far less domain-sensitive than other approaches: the domain is largely covered by the input text collection. TICCL comes in two variants: one with a classic CLAM web application interface, and one with the PhilosTEI interface.