Optical Character Recognition Still Struggling With Handwriting

Ian Lamont recently asked Google if they planned to extend their transcription of books and other printed media to include public records, many of which were handwritten before word processors became ubiquitous. Google wouldn't talk about any potential plans, but Lamont found out a bit more about the limits of optical character recognition in the process: "Even though some CAPTCHA schemes have been cracked in the past year, a far more difficult challenge lies in using software to recognize handwritten text. Optical character recognition has been used for years to convert printed documents into text data, but the enormous variation in handwriting styles has thwarted large-scale OCR imports of handwritten public documents and historical records. Ancestry.com took a surprising approach to digitizing and converting all publicly released US census records from 1790 to 1930: It contracted the job to Chinese firms whose staff manually transcribed the names and other information. The Chinese staff are specially trained to read the cursive and other handwriting styles from digitized paper records and microfilm. The task is ongoing with other handwritten records, at a cost of approximately $10 million per year, the company's CEO says."

Comments

It's more complex problem than people imagine

[saigon_from_europe]

There is an on-line archive of all people that have passed trough Ellis Island (http://www.ellisisland.org/search/passSearch.asp). It consists of retyped (OCR-ed?) ship manifests. Manifests are lists of passengers, with names, places of births and similar information. In original, they are written by hand, in cursive scripts (as expected for late 19th and early 20th century).

Problem is not with the script, but with appropriate context. Someone who retyped this, did not know what to expect in these forms.

My grand-grand father's place of origin was written as "Lipovqani, Slovenia". Pair "lj" was recognized as "q". For someone who is native English speaker "lj" one next to other does not make too much sense. But for anyone with Slavic origin, "q" does not make sense (it's only in foreign words), and "lj" does make sense since it is a way to write "soft l" voice like in "Richelieu".

Ok, maybe that was not the an easy part to guess. But "Slovenia" was serious error. In that moment, Slovenia did not exist. It was part of the Austro-Hungary, and it did not exist as single entity inside it. What was really written was actually "Slavonia". That's an area in Eastern Croatia, and it *was* an entity inside Austro-Hungary.

Should I mention that I was not able to track my grand-grand mother and my other grand-grand father?