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Historical Newspapers in the General Regionally Annotated Corpus of Ukrainian (GRAC): Current State and PressMint Integration Prospects

This paper presents the historical newspaper collection of the General Regionally Annotated Corpus of Ukrainian (GRAC) and outlines its prospective integration into the PressMint infrastructure. The collection comprises 117 newspaper titles published before 1950, totaling 23.6 million tokens, and reflects the political fragmentation, regional variation, and orthographic diversity of Ukrainian-language press from the late nineteenth to mid-twentieth century. We describe the corpus composition, temporal and geographic distribution, and metadata architecture. Special attention is given to morphosyntactic annotation challenges arising from the old Western Ukrainian orthography (Zhelekhivka), as well as issues related to annotating historical texts using the rule-based TagText parser and neural UDPipe2 models. The paper compares GRAC’s vertical format and metadata system with the TEI-based PressMint standard, identifying technical and conceptual harmonization challenges. Integrating GRAC newspapers into PressMint will facilitate comparative research on language policy, regional standardization, and media discourse within a broader European context.