Recently our new HTR+ was tested on different styles of Church Slavonic handwritings by Achim Rabus, who is holding the Chair of Slavic Linguistics at the University of Freiburg in Germany. With Transkribus’ technology the error rates went down to 3 to 5 percent. Superscript letters, abbreviations and word separation are the challenges the HTR+ had to deal with.
A paper on the topic of recognizing handwritten text in Slavic manuscripts with Transkribus is about to be publicised by Achim Rabus. Within this project he discovered the potential of Transkribus when it comes to the digitizing of Church Slavonic manuscripts: the possibility to search in big documents without even having a special model for the individual handwriting and the opportunity to avoid a full manual transcription and instead just correcting the mistakes of the automated transcription makes “digitisation-life” a lot easier.
Part of the models Achim Rabus has trained already contain different hands and provide useful automatic transcripts. Nevertheless the READ-Team is working on further improving Transkribus in the way, that also for documents with mixed handwritings automatic transcripts with low character error rate can be produced.
Cooperation is the key for getting out the biggest benefit for everybody. That is also what Achim Rabus is convinced of and therefore he is happy to share his model with interested people. You can get in touch with him via email: achim.rabus@slavistik.uni-freiburg.de
You can have a look at the draft of the paper Recognizing handwritten text in Slavic manuscripts: A neural-network approach using Transkribus under the following link: https://www.academia.edu/38835297/Recognizing_handwritten_text_in_Slavic_manuscripts_A_neural-network_approach_using_Transkribus_1_Achim_Rabus
Source: Rabus, Achim: Recognizing handwritten text in Slavic manuscripts: A neural-network approach using Transkribus