Implementation of a Human-Computer Interface for Computer Assisted Translation and Handwritten Text Recognition

A human-computer interface is developed to provide services of computer assisted machine translation (CAT) and computer assisted transcription of handwritten text images (CATTI). The back-end machine translation (MT) and handwritten text recognition (HTR) systems are provided by the Pattern Recognition and Human Language Technology (PRHLT) research group. The idea is to provide users with easy to use tools to convert interactive translation and transcription feasible tasks. The assisted service is provided by remote servers with CAT or CATTI capabilities. The interface supplies the user with tools for efficient local edition: deletion, insertion and substitution.Ocampo Sepúlveda, JC. (2009). Implementation of a Human-Computer Interface for Computer Assisted Translation and Handwritten Text Recognition. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/14318Archivo delegad

Multimodal Interactive Transcription of Handwritten Text Images

En esta tesis se presenta un nuevo marco interactivo y multimodal para la transcripción de Documentos manuscritos. Esta aproximación, lejos de proporcionar la transcripción completa pretende asistir al experto en la dura tarea de transcribir. Hasta la fecha, los sistemas de reconocimiento de texto manuscrito disponibles no proporcionan transcripciones aceptables por los usuarios y, generalmente, se requiere la intervención del humano para corregir las transcripciones obtenidas. Estos sistemas han demostrado ser realmente útiles en aplicaciones restringidas y con vocabularios limitados (como es el caso del reconocimiento de direcciones postales o de cantidades numéricas en cheques bancarios), consiguiendo en este tipo de tareas resultados aceptables. Sin embargo, cuando se trabaja con documentos manuscritos sin ningún tipo de restricción (como documentos manuscritos antiguos o texto espontáneo), la tecnología actual solo consigue resultados inaceptables. El escenario interactivo estudiado en esta tesis permite una solución más efectiva. En este escenario, el sistema de reconocimiento y el usuario cooperan para generar la transcripción final de la imagen de texto. El sistema utiliza la imagen de texto y una parte de la transcripción previamente validada (prefijo) para proponer una posible continuación. Despues, el usuario encuentra y corrige el siguente error producido por el sistema, generando así un nuevo prefijo mas largo. Este nuevo prefijo, es utilizado por el sistema para sugerir una nueva hipótesis. La tecnología utilizada se basa en modelos ocultos de Markov y n-gramas. Estos modelos son utilizados aquí de la misma manera que en el reconocimiento automático del habla. Algunas modificaciones en la definición convencional de los n-gramas han sido necesarias para tener en cuenta la retroalimentación del usuario en este sistema.Romero Gómez, V. (2010). Multimodal Interactive Transcription of Handwritten Text Images [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/8541Palanci

Interactive-predictive neural multimodal systems

[EN] Despite the advances achieved by neural models in sequence to sequence learning, exploited in a variety of tasks, they still make errors. In many use cases, these are corrected by a human expert in a posterior revision process. The interactive-predictive framework aims to minimize the human effort spent on this process by considering partial corrections for iteratively refining the hypothesis. In this work, we generalize the interactive-predictive approach, typically applied in to machine translation field, to tackle other multimodal problems namely, image and video captioning. We study the application of this framework to multimodal neural sequence to sequence models. We show that, following this framework, we approximately halve the effort spent for correcting the outputs generated by the automatic systems. Moreover, we deploy our systems in a publicly accessible demonstration, that allows to better understand the behavior of the interactive-predictive framework.The research leading to these results has received funding from MINECO under grant IDIFEDER/2018/025 Sistemas de fabricacion inteligentes para la industria 4.0, action co-funded by the European Regional Development Fund 2014-2020 (FEDER), and from the European Commission under grant H2020, reference 825111 (DeepHealth). We also acknowledge NVIDIA Corporation for the donation of GPUs used in this work.Peris, Á.; Casacuberta Nolla, F. (2019). Interactive-predictive neural multimodal systems. Springer. 16-28. https://doi.org/978-3-030-31332-6_2S162

Contex-aware gestures for mixed-initiative text editings UIs

This is a pre-copyedited, author-produced PDF of an article accepted for publication in Interacting with computers following peer review. The version of record is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwu019[EN] This work is focused on enhancing highly interactive text-editing applications with gestures. Concretely, we study Computer Assisted Transcription of Text Images (CATTI), a handwriting transcription system that follows a corrective feedback paradigm, where both the user and the system collaborate efficiently to produce a high-quality text transcription. CATTI-like applications demand fast and accurate gesture recognition, for which we observed that current gesture recognizers are not adequate enough. In response to this need we developed MinGestures, a parametric context-aware gesture recognizer. Our contributions include a number of stroke features for disambiguating copy-mark gestures from handwritten text, plus the integration of these gestures in a CATTI application. It becomes finally possible to create highly interactive stroke-based text-editing interfaces, without worrying to verify the user intent on-screen. We performed a formal evaluation with 22 e-pen users and 32 mouse users using a gesture vocabulary of 10 symbols. MinGestures achieved an outstanding accuracy (<1% error rate) with very high performance (<1 ms of recognition time). We then integrated MinGestures in a CATTI prototype and tested the performance of the interactive handwriting system when it is driven by gestures. Our results show that using gestures in interactive handwriting applications is both advantageous and convenient when gestures are simple but context-aware. Taken together, this work suggests that text-editing interfaces not only can be easily augmented with simple gestures, but also may substantially improve user productivity.This work has been supported by the European Commission through the 7th Framework Program (tranScriptorium: FP7- ICT-2011-9, project 600707 and CasMaCat: FP7-ICT-2011-7, project 287576). It has also been supported by the Spanish MINECO under grant TIN2012-37475-C02-01 (STraDa), and the Generalitat Valenciana under grant ISIC/2012/004 (AMIIS).Leiva, LA.; Alabau, V.; Romero Gómez, V.; Toselli, AH.; Vidal, E. (2015). Contex-aware gestures for mixed-initiative text editings UIs. Interacting with Computers. 27(6):675-696. https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwu019S675696276Alabau V. Leiva L. A. Transcribing Handwritten Text Images with a Word Soup Game. Proc. Extended Abstr. Hum. Factors Comput. Syst. (CHI EA) 2012.Alabau V. Rodríguez-Ruiz L. Sanchis A. Martínez-Gómez P. Casacuberta F. 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Munoz P. C. Hernández-Tornero C. Leiva L. A. Pastor M. Romero V. Toselli A. H. Vidal E. Transcribing a XVII Century Handwritten Botanical Specimen Book from Scratch. Proc. Int. Conf. Digital Access Textual Cultural Heritage (DATeCH). 2014.Buxton W. The natural language of interaction: a perspective on non-verbal dialogues. INFOR 1988;26:428-438.Cao X. Zhai S. Modeling Human Performance of Pen Stroke Gestures. Proc. SIGCHI Conf. Hum. Factors Comput. Syst. (CHI). 2007.Castro-Bleda M. J. España-Boquera S. Llorens D. Marzal A. Prat F. Vilar J. M. Zamora-Martinez F. Speech Interaction in a Multimodal Tool for Handwritten Text Transcription. Proc. Int. Conf. Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI) 2011.Connell S. D. Jain A. K. Template-based on-line character recognition. Pattern Recognition 2000;34:1-14.Costagliola G. Deufemia V. Polese G. Risi M. A Parsing Technique for Sketch Recognition Systems. Proc. 2004 IEEE Symp. Vis. Lang. Hum. Centric Comput. 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Interactive Error Repair for an Online Handwriting Interface. Proc. SIGCHI Conf. Hum. Factors Comput. Syst. (CHI) 2010.Jelinek F. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press; 1998. Statistical Methods for Speech Recognition.Johansson S. Atwell E. Garside R. Leech G. The Tagged LOB Corpus, User's Manual. Norwegian Computing Center for the Humanities. 1996.Karat C.-M. Halverson C. Horn D. Karat J. Patterns of Entry and Correction in Large Vocabulary Continuous Speech Recognition Systems. Proc. SIGCHI Conf. Hum. Factors Comput. Syst. (CHI). 1999.Kerrick, D. D., & Bovik, A. C. (1988). Microprocessor-based recognition of handprinted characters from a tablet input. Pattern Recognition, 21(5), 525-537. doi:10.1016/0031-3203(88)90011-8Koschinski M. Winkler H. Lang M. Segmentation and Recognition of Symbols within Handwritten Mathematical Expressions. Proc. IEEE Int. Conf. Acoustics Speech Signal Process. (ICASSP). 1995.Kosmala A. Rigoll G. 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SIGCHI Conf. Hum. Factors Comput. Syst. (CHI) 2010.Li W. Hammond T. Using Scribble Gestures to Enhance Editing Behaviors of Sketch Recognition Systems. Proc. Extended Abstr. Hum. Factors Comput. Syst. (CHI EA). 2012.Liao C. Guimbretière F. Hinckley K. Hollan J. Papiercraft: a gesture-based command system for interactive paper. ACM Trans. Comput.–Hum. Interaction (TOCHI) 2008;14:18:1-18:27.Liu P. Soong F. K. Word Graph Based Speech Rcognition Error Correction by Handwriting Input. Proc. Int. Conf. Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI). 2006.Long A. Landay J. Rowe L. Implications for a Gesture Design Tool. Proc. SIGCHI Conf. Hum. Factors Comput. Syst. (CHI) 1999.Long A. C. Jr. Landay J. A. Rowe L. A. Michiels J. Visual Similarity of Pen Gestures. Proc. SIGCHI Conf. Hum. Factors Comput. Syst. (CHI). 2000.MacKenzie, I. S., & Chang, L. (1999). A performance comparison of two handwriting recognizers. Interacting with Computers, 11(3), 283-297. doi:10.1016/s0953-5438(98)00030-7MacKenzie I. S. 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Multiple Contributions to Interactive Transcription and Translation of Old Text Documents

There are huge historical document collections residing in libraries, museums and archives that are currently being digitized for preservation purposes and to make them available worldwide through large, on-line digital libraries. The main objective, however, is not to simply provide access to raw images of digitized documents, but to annotate them with their real informative content and, in particular, with text transcriptions and, if convenient, text translations too. This work aims at contributing to the development of advanced techniques and interfaces for the analysis, transcription and translation of images of old archive documents, following an interactive-predictive approach.Serrano Martínez-Santos, N. (2009). Multiple Contributions to Interactive Transcription and Translation of Old Text Documents. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/11272Archivo delegad

Transcribing a 17th-century botanical manuscript: Longitudinal evaluation of document layout detection and interactive transcription

[EN] We present a process for cost-effective transcription of cursive handwritten text images that has been tested on a 1,000-page 17th-century book about botanical species. The process comprised two main tasks, namely: (1) preprocessing: page layout analysis, text line detection, and extraction; and (2) transcription of the extracted text line images. Both tasks were carried out with semiautomatic pro- cedures, aimed at incrementally minimizing user correction effort, by means of computer-assisted line detection and interactive handwritten text recognition technologies. The contribution derived from this work is three-fold. First, we provide a detailed human-supervised transcription of a relatively large historical handwritten book, ready to be searchable, indexable, and accessible to cultural heritage scholars as well as the general public. Second, we have conducted the first longitudinal study to date on interactive handwriting text recognition, for which we provide a very comprehensive user assessment of the real-world per- formance of the technologies involved in this work. Third, as a result of this process, we have produced a detailed transcription and document layout infor- mation (i.e. high-quality labeled data) ready to be used by researchers working on automated technologies for document analysis and recognition.This work is supported by the European Commission through the EU projects HIMANIS (JPICH program, Spanish, grant Ref. PCIN-2015-068) and READ (Horizon-2020 program, grant Ref. 674943); and the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (grant number SP20130189). This work was also part of the Valorization and I+D+i Resources program of VLC/CAMPUS and has been funded by the Spanish MECD as part of the International Excellence Campus program.Toselli, AH.; Leiva, LA.; Bordes-Cabrera, I.; Hernández-Tornero, C.; Bosch Campos, V.; Vidal, E. (2018). Transcribing a 17th-century botanical manuscript: Longitudinal evaluation of document layout detection and interactive transcription. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities. 33(1):173-202. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqw064S173202331Bazzi, I., Schwartz, R., & Makhoul, J. (1999). An omnifont open-vocabulary OCR system for English and Arabic. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 21(6), 495-504. doi:10.1109/34.771314Causer, T., Tonra, J., & Wallace, V. (2012). Transcription maximized; expense minimized? Crowdsourcing and editing The Collected Works of Jeremy Bentham*. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 27(2), 119-137. doi:10.1093/llc/fqs004Ramel, J. Y., Leriche, S., Demonet, M. L., & Busson, S. (2007). User-driven page layout analysis of historical printed books. International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition (IJDAR), 9(2-4), 243-261. doi:10.1007/s10032-007-0040-6Romero, V., Fornés, A., Serrano, N., Sánchez, J. A., Toselli, A. H., Frinken, V., … Lladós, J. (2013). The ESPOSALLES database: An ancient marriage license corpus for off-line handwriting recognition. Pattern Recognition, 46(6), 1658-1669. doi:10.1016/j.patcog.2012.11.024Romero, V., Toselli, A. H., & Vidal, E. (2012). Multimodal Interactive Handwritten Text Transcription. Series in Machine Perception and Artificial Intelligence. doi:10.1142/8394Toselli, A. H., Romero, V., Pastor, M., & Vidal, E. (2010). Multimodal interactive transcription of text images. Pattern Recognition, 43(5), 1814-1825. doi:10.1016/j.patcog.2009.11.019Toselli, A. H., Vidal, E., Romero, V., & Frinken, V. (2016). HMM word graph based keyword spotting in handwritten document images. Information Sciences, 370-371, 497-518. doi:10.1016/j.ins.2016.07.063Bunke, H., Bengio, S., & Vinciarelli, A. (2004). Offline recognition of unconstrained handwritten texts using HMMs and statistical language models. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 26(6), 709-720. doi:10.1109/tpami.2004.1

Interactive handwriting recognition with limited user effort

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s10032-013-0204-5[EN] Transcription of handwritten text in (old) documents is an important, time-consuming task for digital libraries. Although post-editing automatic recognition of handwritten text is feasible, it is not clearly better than simply ignoring it and transcribing the document from scratch. A more effective approach is to follow an interactive approach in which both the system is guided by the user, and the user is assisted by the system to complete the transcription task as efficiently as possible. Nevertheless, in some applications, the user effort available to transcribe documents is limited and fully supervision of the system output is not realistic. To circumvent these problems, we propose a novel interactive approach which efficiently employs user effort to transcribe a document by improving three different aspects. Firstly, the system employs a limited amount of effort to solely supervise recognised words that are likely to be incorrect. Thus, user effort is efficiently focused on the supervision of words for which the system is not confident enough. Secondly, it refines the initial transcription provided to the user by recomputing it constrained to user supervisions. In this way, incorrect words in unsupervised parts can be automatically amended without user supervision. Finally, it improves the underlying system models by retraining the system from partially supervised transcriptions. In order to prove these statements, empirical results are presented on two real databases showing that the proposed approach can notably reduce user effort in the transcription of handwritten text in (old) documents.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant Agreement No 287755 (transLectures). Also supported by the Spanish Government (MICINN, MITyC, "Plan E", under Grants MIPRCV "Consolider Ingenio 2010", MITTRAL (TIN2009-14633-C03-01), erudito.com (TSI-020110-2009-439), iTrans2 (TIN2009-14511), and FPU (AP2007-02867), and the Generalitat Valenciana (Grants Prometeo/2009/014 and GV/2010/067).Serrano Martinez Santos, N.; Giménez Pastor, A.; Civera Saiz, J.; Sanchis Navarro, JA.; Juan Císcar, A. (2014). Interactive handwriting recognition with limited user effort. International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition. 17(1):47-59. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10032-013-0204-5S4759171Agua, M., Serrano, N., Civera, J., Juan, A.: Character-based handwritten text recognition of multilingual documents. In: Proceedings of Advances in Speech and Language Technologies for Iberian Languages (IBERSPEECH 2012), Madrid (Spain), pp. 187–196 (2012)Ahn, L.V., Maurer, B., Mcmillen, C., Abraham, D., Blum, M.: reCAPTCHA: human-based character recognition via web security measures. 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Effective balancing error and user effort in interactive handwriting recognition

This is the author’s version of a work that was accepted for publication in Pattern Recognition Letters. Changes resulting from the publishing process, such as peer review, editing, corrections, structural formatting, and other quality control mechanisms may not be reflected in this document. Changes may have been made to this work since it was submitted for publication. A definitive version was subsequently published in Pattern Recognition Letters, Volume 37, 1 February 2014, Pages 135–142 DOI 10.1016/j.patrec.2013.03.010[EN] Transcription of handwritten text documents is an expensive and time-consuming task. Unfortunately, the accuracy of current state-of-the-art handwriting recognition systems cannot guarantee fully-automatic high quality transcriptions, so we need to revert to the computer assisted approach. Although this approach reduces the user effort needed to transcribe a given document, the transcription of handwriting text documents still requires complete manual supervision. An especially appealing scenario is the interactive transcription of handwriting documents, in which the user defines the amount of errors that can be tolerated in the final transcribed document. Under this scenario, the transcription of a handwriting text document could be obtained efficiently, supervising only a certain number of incorrectly recognised words. In this work, we develop a new method for predicting the error rate in a block of automatically recognised words, and estimate how much effort is required to correct a transcription to a certain user-defined error rate. The proposed method is included in an interactive approach to transcribing handwritten text documents, which efficiently employs user interactions by means of active and semi-supervised learning techniques, along with a hypothesis recomputation algorithm based on constrained Viterbi search. Transcription results, in terms of trade-off between user effort and transcription accuracy, are reported for two real handwritten documents, and prove the effectiveness of the proposed approach.The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under Grant agreement No 287755 (transLectures). Also supported by the EC (FEDER, FSE), the Spanish Government (MICINN, MITyC, "Plan E", under grants MIPRCV "Consolider Ingenio 2010", MITTRAL (TIN2009-14633-C03-01), iTrans2 (TIN2009-14511), and FPU (AP2007-02867), and the Generalitat Valenciana (Grants Prometeo/2009/014 and GV/2010/067). Special thanks to Jesus Andres for his fruitful discussions.Serrano Martinez Santos, N.; Civera Saiz, J.; Sanchis Navarro, JA.; Juan Císcar, A. (2014). Effective balancing error and user effort in interactive handwriting recognition. Pattern Recognition Letters. 37(1):135-142. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.patrec.2013.03.010S13514237