As Claire says, I've never heard of handwriting recognition software that is likely to be at all reliable for a language it hasn't been trained on. I also suggest having it transcribed by two different human transcribers. You then run a comparison of the two versions (after appropriate normalization so that you don't detect things like different line breaks), which will give you a large percentage of transcription errors. This is the technique used by large-scale digitization projects.<br>
<br><div class="gmail_quote">On Tue, Jul 10, 2012 at 10:44 AM, Claire Bowern <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:clairebowern@gmail.com" target="_blank">clairebowern@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<span style="font-size:12px">Undergraduates.</span>
</div><div><span style="font-size:12px">Seriously, there's so much contextualisation that goes on when reading handwriting, unless there's a machine learning model of the language, I can pretty much guarantee that an undergrad or two with some epigraphy training and a general idea of possible syllables in the language will do much better than any program.</span></div>
<span class="HOEnZb"><font color="#888888"><div><span style="font-size:12px">Claire</span></div></font></span><div class="HOEnZb"><div class="h5">
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<p style="color:#a0a0a8">On Tuesday, July 10, 2012 at 1:41 PM, James N. Stanford wrote:</p>
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<div><span style="border-collapse:collapse;color:rgb(34,34,34);font-family:arial,sans-serif;font-size:13px">Dear RNLD,</span></div>
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Does anyone have a suggestion about handwriting recognition software? An Abenaki student is trying to take 400 pages of old documents of handwritten Abenaki and turn them into text, i.e., from a scanned handwritten PDF to an editable Word document. It's written
in a Roman alphabet script.
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<div>Any ideas?</div>
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<div>Thanks,</div>
<div>Jim</div>
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<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px">
James N. Stanford, Ph.D.<br>
Assistant Professor of Linguistics & Cognitive Science<br>
Dartmouth College<br>
305 Reed Hall, HB 6220<br>
Hanover, NH 03755<br>
<a href="tel:%28603%29646-0099" value="+16036460099" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">(603)646-0099</a></p>
<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px">
<a href="http://www.dartmouth.edu/%7Ejstanford" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">www.dartmouth.edu/~jstanford</a></p>
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e-mail: <a href="mailto:James.N.Stanford@Dartmouth.edu" target="_blank">James.N.Stanford@Dartmouth.edu</a></p>
<p style="margin-top:0px;margin-right:0px;margin-bottom:0px;margin-left:0px">
or: <a href="mailto:stanfo23@gmail.com" style="color:rgb(17,85,204)" target="_blank">stanfo23@gmail.com</a></p>
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