The Location and Function of Formulaic Expressions in the Resolutions of the Dutch States General

Formulaic expressions are commonly used in administrative documents to signal important aspects of a document. Medieval charters contain opening and closing formulas to signal that the document is a charter and what type of charter it is. Notarial deeds contain formulas based on notary manuals to make sure the transaction they confirm is unambiguous and follows protocol.

In previous work, we developed techniques to automatically detect formulas in historic document collections, while dealing with orthographic variation introduced by historic spelling variation and change and errors introduced by OCR and HTR processes. In this paper, we investigate the nature of the formulas detected in the resolutions of the Dutch States General.

Our findings are that the function of formulas is related to their location in the resolutions, and that different types of formulas are linked to different types of resolutions. But we also find that formulas contain a lot of variation which makes their detection and classification challenging.