@inproceedings{schone-etal-2014-corpus,
    title = "Corpus and Evaluation of Handwriting Recognition of Historical Genealogical Records",
    author = "Schone, Patrick  and
      Nielson, Heath  and
      Ward, Mark",
    editor = "Calzolari, Nicoletta  and
      Choukri, Khalid  and
      Declerck, Thierry  and
      Loftsson, Hrafn  and
      Maegaard, Bente  and
      Mariani, Joseph  and
      Moreno, Asuncion  and
      Odijk, Jan  and
      Piperidis, Stelios",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation ({LREC}'14)",
    month = may,
    year = "2014",
    address = "Reykjavik, Iceland",
    publisher = "European Language Resources Association (ELRA)",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/L14-1237/",
    pages = "153--159",
    abstract = "Over the last few decades, significant strides have been made in handwriting recognition (HR), which is the automatic transcription of handwritten documents. HR often focuses on modern handwritten material, but in the electronic age, the volume of handwritten material is rapidly declining. However, we believe HR is on the verge of having major application to historical record collections. In recent years, archives and genealogical organizations have conducted huge campaigns to transcribe valuable historical record content with such transcription being largely done through human-intensive labor. HR has the potential of revolutionizing these transcription endeavors. To test the hypothesis that this technology is close to applicability, and to provide a testbed for reducing any accuracy gaps, we have developed an evaluation paradigm for historical record handwriting recognition. We created a huge test corpus consisting of four historical data collections of four differing genres and three languages. In this paper, we provide the details of these extensive resources which we intend to release to the research community for further study. Since several research organizations have already participated in this evaluation, we also show initial results and comparisons to human levels of performance."
}