Xerox Research Centre Europe is one of the READ research partners, with responsibility for Document Understanding. Document Understanding is a crucial part of the process of training computers to recognise historical documents, as Hervé Déjean from the Xerox team explains in this blog.
Document Understanding involves analysing the layout of a document in order to extract human understandable information about its content. Hervé’s blog presents a useful overview of the concept and offers specific details about how this method can be applied to historical documents.
Hervé describes how he has been using Sequential Pattern Mining Techniques on eighteenth-century wedding registers provided by Passau Diocesan Archives, another partner in the READ project. Document Understanding helps to ensure that we can group information from a document into a meaningful sequence – in this case, ensuring the right groom is matched with the right bride on the right day!