This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology, SFCM 2015, held in Stuttgart, Germany, in September 2015. The 5 revised full papers and 5 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 16 submissions. The SFCM Workshops focus on linguistically motivated morphological analysis and generation, computational frameworks for implementing such systems, and linguistic frameworks suitable for computational implementation. SFCM 2015 and the papers presented in this volume aim at broadening the scope to include research on very underresourced languages, interactions between computational morphology and formal, quantitative, and descriptive morphology, as well as applications of computational morphology in the Digital Humanities.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Systems and Frameworks for Computational Morphology, SFCM 2013, held in Berlin, in September 2013. The 7 full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 15 submissions and are complemented with an invited talk. The papers discuss recent advances in the field of computational morphology.

From the point of view of computational linguistics, morphological resources are the basis for all higher-level applications. This is especially true for languages with a rich morphology, such as German or Finnish. A morphology component should thus be capable of analyzing single word forms as well as whole corpora. For many practical applications, not only morphological analysis, but also generation is required, i.e., the production of surfaces corresponding to speci?c categories. Apart from uses in computational linguistics, there are also numerous practical - plications that either require morphological analysis and generation or that can greatly bene?t from it, for example, in text processing, user interfaces, or information - trieval. These applications have speci?c requirements for morphological components, including requirements from software engineering, such as programming interfaces or robustness. In 1994, the First Morpholympics took place at the University of Erlangen- Nuremberg, a competition between several systems for the analysis and generation of German word forms. Eight systems participated in the First Morpholympics; the conference proceedings [1] thus give a very good overview of the state of the art in computational morphologyfor German as of 1994.

More and more historical texts are becoming available in digital form. Digitization of paper documents is motivated by the aim of preserving cultural heritage and making it more accessible, both to laypeople and scholars. As digital images cannot be searched for text, digitization projects increasingly strive to create digital text, which can be searched and otherwise automatically processed, in addition to facsimiles. Indeed, the emerging field of digital humanities heavily relies on the availability of digital text for its studies. Together with the increasing availability of historical texts in digital form, there is a growing interest in applying natural language processing (NLP) methods and tools to historical texts. However, the specific linguistic properties of historical texts -- the lack of standardized orthography, in particular -- pose special challenges for NLP. This book aims to give an introduction to NLP for historical texts and an overview of the state of the art in this field. The book starts with an overview of methods for the acquisition of historical texts (scanning and OCR), discusses text encoding and annotation schemes, and presents examples of corpora of historical texts in a variety of languages. The book then discusses specific methods, such as creating part-of-speech taggers for historical languages or handling spelling variation. A final chapter analyzes the relationship between NLP and the digital humanities. Certain recently emerging textual genres, such as SMS, social media, and chat messages, or newsgroup and forum postings share a number of properties with historical texts, for example, nonstandard orthography and grammar, and profuse use of abbreviations. The methods and techniques required for the effective processing of historical texts are thus also of interest for research in other domains. Table of Contents: Introduction / NLP and Digital Humanities / Spelling in Historical Texts / Acquiring Historical Texts / Text Encoding and Annotation Schemes / Handling Spelling Variation / NLP Tools for Historical Languages / Historical Corpora / Conclusion / Bibliography