Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archives wants your help

Re:Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archi... by demosthanos on Friday January 17, 2025 @10:29PM (#42745559)

The archivists themselves say that they run into such texts often enough that this program was needed:

> The agency uses artificial intelligence and a technology known as optical character recognition to extract text from historical documents. But these methods don’t always work, and they aren’t always accurate.

They are absolutely aware of the advances in these tools, so if they say they're not completely there yet I believe them. One likely reason is that the models probably have less 1800s-era cursive in their training set than they do modern cursive.

It's likely that with more human-tagged data they could improve on the state of the art for OCR, but it's pretty arrogant to doubt the agency in charge of this sort of thing when they say the tech isn't there yet.

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Re:Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archi... by tedunangst on Friday January 17, 2025 @11:04PM (#42745727)

Can someone please post a sample of one of these images that can only be read by a human for us naive OCR believers to see?

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Re:Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archi... by CamperBob2 on Saturday January 18, 2025 @12:29AM (#42746106)

To be fair there was a similar discussion a few days ago in which an SME remained unconvinced: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42566391

I don't necessarily agree with her conclusion because she wasn't participating directly in the thread and wasn't completely responsive to some of the points raised, but still, it appears that there are a few instances of difficult-to-read handwriting where OCR is still coming in second to skilled human interpretation.

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Re:Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archi... by jncfhnb on Saturday January 18, 2025 @10:15AM (#42748957)

That’s comprehension of English not reading characters

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Re:Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archi... by BugsJustFindMe on Saturday January 18, 2025 @10:58AM (#42749248)

I've posted these above, but I'll give you your own copy because the bits are free. Does your OCR work on these? Mine sadly doesn't. But if yours does, then I'll switch to it.

https://imgur.com/a/CDU6Lgs

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Re:Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archi... by jncfhnb on Saturday January 18, 2025 @02:35PM (#42750778)

The problem statement was text that random humans can read and OCR cannot.

If you want to provide a good faith answer at least make it English. I assume this is French but it’s obviously much harder to evaluate on both ends when you’re mixing up the language.

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Re:Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archi... by BugsJustFindMe on Sunday January 19, 2025 @11:00AM (#42758160)

I'm confused.

Which parts of "OCR" and "human" stand for "modern english"?

Are you suggesting that humans can't read or write in french? Because I can point to a lot of them who would disagree.

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Re:Can you read this cursive handwriting? The National Archi... by jncfhnb on Saturday January 18, 2025 @03:00AM (#42746677)

Then please provide a single example that we can’t instantly solve. Happy to prove them wrong.

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