Development of a web-based system for the postcorrection of historical OCR'ed texts

本项目旨在开发一个基于网络的ocr识别历史文本后校正工具和系统。由于任何OCR结果都有其错误，因此OCR文本输出对许多人文学科应用程序的有用性至关重要地取决于后校正设施。CIS开发了一个独立的开源Java（非基于web）版本的后校正工具PoCoTo（后校正工具），该工具具有先进的语言技术，通过该技术，具有历史拼写的整个错误系列文档可以在OCR输出和原始图像的一致性视图中显示。PoCoTo已经广为公众所知，并在德国的数字人文项目中用于后期校正目的。由于其用户的特殊需求，我们希望将其开发和分发为基于web的开源多用户系统。它将被开发成一个基于服务器基础设施的组件，以支持机构OCR工作流，而不是需要在本地安装在自己的计算机上。除了这种基本结构的改变外，还将追求下列其他目标：用户修正将被用于计算更好的统计误差轮廓的假定误差系列在后台，从而加快了修正。2. 拉丁文完整形式词典的一些简单扩充将为语言技术（统计错误分析）完全适用于拉丁文文本OCR输出的后校正提供基础。3. 除了Abbyy和Tesseract输出外，还可以处理OCRopus的开源OCR系统输出，这将增加系统在OCR引擎方面的灵活性。如有需要，将在即将提出的fg历史OCR倡议的范围内，在一项后续建议中规划进一步改进这一制度和同其他集团的合作。

This projects aims to develop a web based tool and system for the postcorrection ofOCR recognized historical texts. As any OCR result has its share of errors,the usefulness of OCR text output for many applications in the humanities crucially dependson a postcorrection facility. A standalone open source Java (non-web-based) version of such a postcorrectiontool named PoCoTo (Post-Correction Tool) was developed at CIS featuringadvanced language technology by which whole error series of documents withhistorical spellings can be displayed in a concordance view of OCR output and original image.PoCoTo has already made known to a wide public and is being used in Digital Humanities projectsin Germany for postcorrection purposes. Due to specific demands from its users we want to develop and distribute it as an open source web based, multi-user system. Instead of needingto be locally installed on one's own computer, it will be developed into a component of a server basedinfrastructure to support an institutional OCR workflow.Apart from this infrastructural change, the following additional goals will be pursued:1. User corrections will get used to calculate ever better statistical error profiles of putative errors series in the background, thus speeding up the correction. 2. Some simple augmentations of a Latin full form lexicon will provide the foundations to make the language technology (statistical error profiling) fully applicable to the postcorrection of the OCR output of Latin texts. 3. The flexibility of the system with regard to OCR engines will be increased by making it possible to treat the output of the open source OCR system OCRopus in addition to Abbyy and Tesseract output. Should the need arise, further improvements of the system and cooperations with other groups will be planned in a follow-up proposal within the context of the forthcoming DFG initiative for historical OCR.