# Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English Second Release

## LDC2025T09

### Introduction

Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English Second Release (LDC2025T09) was developed at the University of Pennsylvania and consists of running texts and text samples of British English prose from the earliest Middle English documents (1100 CE) up to the period of the First World War (1914 CE). This second release corrects errors and inconsistencies in Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English (LDC2020T16), further streamlines annotation, simplifies the directory structure, and includes updated documentation.

This data set contains three corpora covering traditionally recognized periods of English:

- The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English, second edition
- The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Early Modern English
- The Penn Parsed Corpus of Modern British English, second edition

Also included in this release are updated annotation guidelines, philological information for each corpus and the CorpusSearch 2 program, which allows users to search the data for words, word sequences and syntactic structure.

The Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English were designed for students and scholars of the history of English, especially the historical syntax of the language. They have also been used by computational linguists for domain adaptation. See the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English homepage for more information about this project.

### Data

The texts are in two forms: part-of-speech tagged text and syntactically annotated text. Annotations were manually reviewed for accuracy and consistency.

All data is encoded in UTF-8. The data files are presented as plain text, and all philological information is presented as html. The parsed data are in Penn Treebank format.

### Directory Structure

- data/ - Contains the data subdivided by corpus.
- docs/ - Contains the annotation guidelines, additional documentation on the corpus as a whole and for the individual subcorpora, and a file table.
- tools/ - Contains the CorpusSearch program mentioned above.

### Updates

Additional information, updates, bug fixes may be available in the LDC catalog entry for this corpus at LDC2025T09.

### Content Copyright

Portions © 2020, 2025 Anthony Kroch, © 2020, 2025 Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania