Dating medieval English charters
Gelila Tilahun, Andrey Feuerverger, Michael Gervers

TL;DR
This paper presents automated statistical methods to accurately date medieval English charters using linguistic variation and document similarity, aiding historians in studying social and political history.
Contribution
It introduces novel computer-automated techniques for dating undated medieval charters, improving efficiency and accuracy over manual methods.
Findings
Methods successfully applied to the DEEDS dataset
Significant improvement in dating accuracy
Potential to automate large-scale historical document analysis
Abstract
Deeds, or charters, dealing with property rights, provide a continuous documentation which can be used by historians to study the evolution of social, economic and political changes. This study is concerned with charters (written in Latin) dating from the tenth through early fourteenth centuries in England. Of these, at least one million were left undated, largely due to administrative changes introduced by William the Conqueror in 1066. Correctly dating such charters is of vital importance in the study of English medieval history. This paper is concerned with computer-automated statistical methods for dating such document collections, with the goal of reducing the considerable efforts required to date them manually and of improving the accuracy of assigned dates. Proposed methods are based on such data as the variation over time of word and phrase usage, and on measures of distance…
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