Conference Publication Details
Mandatory Fields
Afli H.;Qiu Z.;Way A.;Sheridan P.
Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, LREC 2016
Using SMT for OCR Error Correction of historical texts
2016
January
Published
1
()
Optional Fields
Historical documents OCR Error Correction Statistical machine translation
962
966
A trend to digitize historical paper-based archives has emerged in recent years, with the advent of digital optical scanners. A lot of paper-based books, textbooks, magazines, articles, and documents are being transformed into electronic versions that can be manipulated by a computer. For this purpose, Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems have been developed to transform scanned digital text into editable computer text. However, different kinds of errors in the OCR system output text can be found, but Automatic Error Correction tools can help in performing the quality of electronic texts by cleaning and removing noises. In this paper, we perform a qualitative and quantitative comparison of several error-correction techniques for historical French documents. Experimentation shows that our Machine Translation for Error Correction method is superior to other Language Modelling correction techniques, with nearly 13% relative improvement compared to the initial baseline.
Grant Details