Historical Ink: 19th Century Latin American Spanish Newspaper Corpus with LLM OCR Correction

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new 19th-century Latin American newspaper corpus and a LLM-based OCR correction framework, enhancing historical linguistic research and digitization accuracy.

Contribution

It provides a novel dataset of Latin American newspapers and a flexible LLM-based OCR correction framework for historical texts.

Findings

Created a comprehensive 19th-century Latin American newspaper corpus

Developed a semi-automated LLM-based OCR correction method

Improved OCR accuracy and linguistic analysis capabilities

Abstract

This paper presents two significant contributions: First, it introduces a novel dataset of 19th-century Latin American newspaper texts, addressing a critical gap in specialized corpora for historical and linguistic analysis in this region. Second, it develops a flexible framework that utilizes a Large Language Model for OCR error correction and linguistic surface form detection in digitized corpora. This semi-automated framework is adaptable to various contexts and datasets and is applied to the newly created dataset.