697 research outputs found
Towards robust real-world historical handwriting recognition
In this thesis, we make a bridge from the past to the future by using artificial-intelligence methods for text recognition in a historical Dutch collection of the Natuurkundige Commissie that explored Indonesia (1820-1850). In spite of the successes of systems like 'ChatGPT', reading historical handwriting is still quite challenging for AI. Whereas GPT-like methods work on digital texts, historical manuscripts are only available as an extremely diverse collections of (pixel) images. Despite the great results, current DL methods are very data greedy, time consuming, heavily dependent on the human expert from the humanities for labeling and require machine-learning experts for designing the models. Ideally, the use of deep learning methods should require minimal human effort, have an algorithm observe the evolution of the training process, and avoid inefficient use of the already sparse amount of labeled data. We present several approaches towards dealing with these problems, aiming to improve the robustness of current methods and to improve the autonomy in training. We applied our novel word and line text recognition approaches on nine data sets differing in time period, language, and difficulty: three locally collected historical Latin-based data sets from Naturalis, Leiden; four public Latin-based benchmark data sets for comparability with other approaches; and two Arabic data sets. Using ensemble voting of just five neural networks, a level of accuracy was achieved which required hundreds of neural networks in earlier studies. Moreover, we increased the speed of evaluation of each training epoch without the need of labeled data
Semantic radical consistency and character transparency effects in Chinese: an ERP study
BACKGROUND: This event-related potential (ERP) study aims to investigate the representation and temporal dynamics of Chinese orthography-to-semantics mappings by simultaneously manipulating character transparency and semantic radical consistency. Character components, referred to as radicals, make up the building blocks used dur...postprin
An investigation into the use of linguistic context in cursive script recognition by computer
The automatic recognition of hand-written text has been a goal
for over thirty five years. The highly ambiguous nature of cursive
writing (with high variability between not only different writers, but
even between different samples from the same writer), means that
systems based only on visual information are prone to errors.
It is suggested that the application of linguistic knowledge to
the recognition task may improve recognition accuracy. If a low-level
(pattern recognition based) recogniser produces a candidate lattice
(i.e. a directed graph giving a number of alternatives at each word
position in a sentence), then linguistic knowledge can be used to find
the 'best' path through the lattice.
There are many forms of linguistic knowledge that may be used
to this end. This thesis looks specifically at the use of collocation as a
source of linguistic knowledge. Collocation describes the statistical
tendency of certain words to co-occur in a language, within a defined
range. It is suggested that this tendency may be exploited to aid
automatic text recognition.
The construction and use of a post-processing system
incorporating collocational knowledge is described, as are a number
of experiments designed to test the effectiveness of collocation as an
aid to text recognition. The results of these experiments suggest that
collocational statistics may be a useful form of knowledge for this
application and that further research may produce a system of real
practical use
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