This paper presents an overview, the features, and utility of the Sharebon Corpus. We attempted to construct a corpus of Early Modern Japanese text, which is a part of the Corpus of Historical Japanese (CHJ) built by The National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics. We released a trial version of the Sharebon Corpus on October 28, 2015.
This corpus has not only annotated morphemes and document information, just as the other corpora of the CHJ, but also realized the following new functions. First, we implemented the reference function that displays images of original books printed from woodblocks. Second, we made detailed annotations of information about speakers. Early Modern Japanese texts are written in various styles because of the differences, such as region, social class, and generations among others. In this article, we will illustrate that this corpus, which provides voluminous information, will be effective for such texts.