A Tool for Facilitating OCR Postediting in Historical Documents
Alberto Poncelas, Mohammad Aboomar, Jan Buts, James Hadley, Andy Way
Abstract
Optical character recognition (OCR) for historical documents is a complex procedure subject to a unique set of material issues, including inconsistencies in typefaces and low quality scanning. Consequently, even the most sophisticated OCR engines produce errors. This paper reports on a tool built for postediting the output of Tesseract, more specifically for correcting common errors in digitized historical documents. The proposed tool suggests alternatives for word forms not found in a specified vocabulary. The assumed error is replaced by a presumably correct alternative in the post-edition based on the scores of a Language Model (LM). The tool is tested on a chapter of the book An Essay Towards Regulating the Trade and Employing the Poor of this Kingdom (Cary, 1719). As demonstrated below, the tool is successful in correcting a number of common errors. If sometimes unreliable, it is also transparent and subject to human intervention.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.lt4hala-1.7
- Volume:
- Proceedings of LT4HALA 2020 - 1st Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages
- Month:
- May
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Marseille, France
- Venue:
- LT4HALA
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
- Note:
- Pages:
- 47–51
- Language:
- English
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.lt4hala-1.7
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Alberto Poncelas, Mohammad Aboomar, Jan Buts, James Hadley, and Andy Way. 2020. A Tool for Facilitating OCR Postediting in Historical Documents. In Proceedings of LT4HALA 2020 - 1st Workshop on Language Technologies for Historical and Ancient Languages, pages 47–51, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
- Cite (Informal):
- A Tool for Facilitating OCR Postediting in Historical Documents (Poncelas et al., LT4HALA 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2020.lt4hala-1.7.pdf
- Code
- alberto-poncelas/tesseract_postprocess