Integrating Optical Character Recognition and Machine Translation of Historical Documents

Haithem Afli, Andy Way


Abstract
Machine Translation (MT) plays a critical role in expanding capacity in the translation industry. However, many valuable documents, including digital documents, are encoded in non-accessible formats for machine processing (e.g., Historical or Legal documents). Such documents must be passed through a process of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to render the text suitable for MT. No matter how good the OCR is, this process introduces recognition errors, which often renders MT ineffective. In this paper, we propose a new OCR to MT framework based on adding a new OCR error correction module to enhance the overall quality of translation. Experimentation shows that our new system correction based on the combination of Language Modeling and Translation methods outperforms the baseline system by nearly 30% relative improvement.
Anthology ID:
W16-4015
Volume:
Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Technology Resources and Tools for Digital Humanities (LT4DH)
Month:
December
Year:
2016
Address:
Osaka, Japan
Editors:
Erhard Hinrichs, Marie Hinrichs, Thorsten Trippel
Venue:
LT4DH
SIG:
Publisher:
The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee
Note:
Pages:
109–116
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-4015
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haithem Afli and Andy Way. 2016. Integrating Optical Character Recognition and Machine Translation of Historical Documents. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Language Technology Resources and Tools for Digital Humanities (LT4DH), pages 109–116, Osaka, Japan. The COLING 2016 Organizing Committee.
Cite (Informal):
Integrating Optical Character Recognition and Machine Translation of Historical Documents (Afli & Way, LT4DH 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W16-4015.pdf