Abstract

We describe a method that can make a scanned, handwritten mediaeval latin manuscript accessible to full text search. A generalized HMM is fitted, using transcribed latin to obtain a transition model and one example each of 22 letters to obtain an emission model. We show results for unigram, bigram and trigram models. Our method transcribes 25 pages of a manuscript of Terence with fair accuracy (75 % of letters correctly transcribed). Search results are very strong; we use examples of variant spellings to demonstrate that the search respects the ink of the document. Furthermore, our model produces fair searches on a document from which we obtained no training data. 1. Intoduction There are many large corpora of handwritten scanned documents, and their number is growing rapidly. Collections range from the complete works of Mark Twain to thousands of pages of zoological notes spanning two centuries. Large scale analyses of such corpora

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