frances: Cloud-Based Historical Text Mining with Deep Learning and Parallel Processing
Lilin Yu, Ash Charlton, Wilfrid Askins, Melissa Terras, Rosa Filgueira · 2023
Frances is an advanced cloud-based text mining digital platform that leverages information extraction, knowledge graphs, natural language processing (NLP), deep learning, and parallel processing techniques. It has been specifically designed to unlock the full potential of historical digital textual collections, such as those from the National Library of Scotland, offering cloud-based capabilities and extended support for complex NLP analyses and data visualizations. frances enables realtime recurrent operational text mining and provides robust capabilities for temporal analysis, accompanied by automatic visualizations for easy result inspection. In this paper, we present the motivation behind the development of frances, emphasizing its innovative design and novel implementation aspects. We also outline future development directions, and we evaluate the platform through two comprehensive case studies in history and publishing history.