Opportunities for Personalization for Crowdsourcing in Handwritten Text Recognition

Abstract

Transcribing historical handwritten documents is a difficult task. One facet is that it is a very tedious task normally performed by experts. Some newer techniques rely on crowdsourcing of manual transcription. Crowdsourcing helps speeding up the transcription process, but it is still limited and brings with it new challenges. Though crowdsourcing transcriptions can imply a repetitive task done by a large group of users, there is in fact room for personalization. This paper reports on insights gathered for future personalizations from the "Tikkoun Sofrim" project, that implements a framework for combining automatic handwritten text recognition with crowdsourcing for transcription of complete handwritten manuscripts. As a case study, the Hebrew "Midrash Tanhuma" manuscripts were selected.