2024: The FAR, Federal Acquisition Regulations - Part 23
06 traub
1. 1
Estimating the Impact of OCR Quality
on ResearchTasks in the Digital Humanities
Myriam C. Traub, Jacco van Ossenbruggen!
Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica
24/03/2015
2. 01
Use of digital
archives for…
✤ selection for close reading!
✤ first occurrence of specific
words!
✤ word frequency patterns over !
✤ time !
✤ different sources
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3. 01
Use of digital
archives for…
✤ selection for close reading!
✤ first occurrence of specific
words!
✤ word frequency patterns over !
✤ time !
✤ different sources
It all
depends on OCR
quality!
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4. We care about
average performance
on representative
subsets for generic
cases.
3
Two different perspectives of OCR quality
5. We care about
average performance
on representative
subsets for generic
cases.
I care about
actual performance
on my non-
representative subset
for my specific
query.
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Two different perspectives of OCR quality
13. ✤ American English 2009, 1700 - 1850
“amsterdam” and “amfterdam”
How do I
know?!
What else?
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14. ✤ Current American English, 1700 - 1850
Different versions / pipelines
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15. ✤ Current American English, 1700 - 1850
Different versions / pipelines
How do I know
that they fixed it?!
What else?
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16. Research questions
✤ How can we give humanities researchers the
information they need to understand how the OCR
limitations influence their research tasks?!
✤ What is a good way of estimating uncertainty for a
specific case?!
✤ How to get (the data for) better estimates?
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25. 01
OCR confidence
values useful?
✤ available for all items in the
collection: page, word,
character!
✤ calibration based on limited
ground truth?!
✤ only for highest ranked
words / characters, other
candidates missing
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26. 01
Future work
✤ How to estimate impact of
OCR errors on use cases
outside the ground truth?!
✤ Can we crowdsource part of
this estimation problem?!
✤ How to convey the estimated
impact to researchers using the
corpus?
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27. 01
How does OCR quality
affect your research?
Myriam.Traub@cwi.nl!
Jacco.van.Ossenbruggen@cwi.nl
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