<$BlogRSDUrl$> Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
Marcus P. Zillman, M.S., A.M.H.A. Author/Speaker/Consultant
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Friday, December 24, 2004  

New Search Tool Targets Handwritten Documents
http://www.umass.edu/umhome/news/articles/7683.php

Scientists at the University of Massachusetts Amherst have developed a "first-of-its-kind" document retrieval system that is able to "memorize" keywords in handwritten manuscripts. Computer scientist R. Manmatha says, "Right now, searching a scanned handwritten document is very hard to do. Scanned historical documents are basically images, or pictures, and currently can only be searched if someone manually transcribes the documents or creates an index of their contents. This is time consuming and expensive to do. Given the cost, most handwritten documents are never transcribed or indexed. But there is an enormous amount of handwritten, historical material." Manmatha and his associates have created a demonstration of their search tool using 1,000 pages of George Washington's papers, which can be searched by typing in a common keyword such as "Virginia." According to research assistant Toni Rath, "The basic idea is analogous to searching text documents in one language, say French, using queries in another language, say English. This is usually done by learning models from documents written in both languages. By analogy, our system learns from a parallel body of transcribed scanned images. That is, the word images form a 'visual language' and the transcriptions are in English."

posted by Marcus Zillman | 4:15 AM
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