IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.

Hildelies Balk, IMPACT Project Director, KB National Library of the Netherlands

IMPACT: Challenges and solutions

IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.

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Overview of this presentation

Challenges in digitisation of historical full text IMPACT objectives Approach Achievements Better, Faster, Cheaper

IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.

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The Content Shared vision in Europe: all

cultural heritage available in digital form in this decade

Billions of pages of historical (pre-1900) text in libraries in Europe

Users expect full text to search, tag and re-use

Just image and metadata not enough

IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.

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The full text

VVt Venetien den 1.Junij, Anno 1618.

DJgn i f paffato te S' aö'Jifeert mo?üen/bah .)etgi'uotbciraetail)i.r/JtmelchontDecht te /sbnbe bele btr felbrr geiufttceert baer bnber eeniglje jprant o^fen/bie ftcb .metbeSpaenfcbeu enbeeemgljen bifet Cbeiiupcen berbonbru befe

IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.

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Challenges to OCR:

IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.

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Language Challenges

Historical variants of the Dutch word ‘wereld’ (world):

werelt weerelt wereld weerelds wereldt werelden weereld werrelts waerelds weerlyt wereldts vveerelts waereld weerelden waerelden weerlt werlt werelds sweerels zwerlys swarels swerelts werelts swerrels weirelts tsweerelds werret vverelt werlts werrelt worreld werlden wareld weirelt weireld waerelt werreld werld vvereld weerelts werlde tswerels werreldts weereldt wereldje waereldje weurlt wald weëled

IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.

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Answering the challenges – IMPACTIMPACT – Improving Access to Text (2008-2011) Large-scale integrating research project Consortium of 26 partners Coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands (KB) Co-funded by EU (FP7 ICT Work Programme)

Objectives:Significantly improve mass digitisation of historical printed text by: Innovating OCR software and language technology Sharing expertise and building capacity across Europe Providing facilities for future research and development

IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.

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IMPACT - Approach Content holders, researchers and industry work together to find solutions Based on real life problems in digitisation Tackle each step in the digitisation workflow from scan to full text

Image enhancement: Binarisationnoise removalgeometrical defects correctionNSCR,USAL, ABBYY

OCR

ABBY FR

IBM Adaptive

Dictonaries/interface

LMU,INL

Experimental engines USAL,NCSR,UIBK

Segmentation and Document analysis

USAL,NCSR,ABBYY

Post correction and Enrichment

CONCERT IBM

Error Profiler LMU

Language resources 9 partners

Document Understanding Platform UIBK

Preparation and scanning: guidelines and case studies

All partners

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IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.

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IMPACT – Approach continued Tools to be coupled in Interoperability Framework Tested with Evaluation tools and metrics Against representative set of test data with Ground Truth Basis for further research and development

IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.

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IMPACT Achievements: summary On market: Improved commercial OCR Ready for testing in productive environment:

– Adaptive OCR engine– Tools for OCR correction with volunteer involvement – Computerlexica for nine languages – Digitisation Framework with evaluation tools and dataset– Knowledge bank with guidelines and learning resources– Service for for print space recognition

For future development:– Novel Approaches to preprocessing, OCR and post correction– New language resources with Tools for lexicon building

Centre of Competence for digitisation to start 1 january 2012 Added value: Unique network bringing together experts from different communities

IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.

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IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.

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Results: Better and Faster All tools evaluated in different testscenarios on IMPACT dataset All individual tools show improvement on SOA Some examples of results – there is more!

Image enhancement: Binarisationnoise removalgeometrical defects correctionNSCR,USAL, ABBYY

OCR

ABBY FR

IBM Adaptive

Dictonaries/interface

LMU,INL

Experimental engines USAL,NCSR,UIBK

Segmentation and Document analysis

USAL,NCSR,ABBYY

Post correction and Enrichment

CONCERT IBM

Error Profiler LMU

Language resources 9 partners

Document Understanding Platform UIBK

Better:hybrid line segmentation on 2700 text lines SOA 90,9 →98,8% IMPACT

Better:recognition old fonts FR9→FR10 improved 25%

Better, faster:Adaptive OCR on small testset halves FOM (post processing level required)

Faster: CONCERT increases correction speed up to 40%

Faster: postcorrection with Error Profiler up to 2,7 times faster than without

Better: page split detected on 3.000 images from dataset: SOA 73%→94% IMPACT Better: language

resources show improvement for all 9 languages

IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.

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Results: CheaperIndustry in IMPACT: ABBYY FR Historic Fonts Module more than 10 times cheaper; more flexible rates overall IBM Adaptive OCR and CONCERT: flexible rates Research in IMPACT: Key Language resources free All tools by research partners free for research and free/low rates on non commercial use

(individual licensing required), subject to volume, kind of use and material, support etc.

Framework:Digitisation Framework free and open sourceOpen source wrapper to plug in other (free) toolsFruitful contacts with new open source tool providersIncreasing number of IMPACT tools Open Source

IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.

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Benefits for the Digital Library Reminder: IMPACT is a RESEARCH Project Fitness for productive use of tools already exceeds expectations Rough average of all tests by developers on IMPACT dataset indicates consistent improvement

of up to 20%

What does this mean for the Library objectives: Better access, faster and cheaper production → measured by: retrieval, time and money spent Q1-3 2011: Pilots carried out in house → focus on user feedback and implementation issues Q4 and beyond: pilots planned to measure all aspects

First test in productive environment: ABBYY FR 10 with Dutch lexicon on Dutch 17th C Newspapers 20% increase in Word Accuracy (LD) 15% improvement in word retrieval

IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.

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Benefits for the End User Users of the Libraries:

– researchers in the humanities – Greater public

End user Only interest: retrieval = words searched and found correctly

Preliminary results of OCR combined with dictionary on difficult material (17th century newspapers)

indicate already 15% increase of words found

→ For 1 M words this means 150 K more words found And this is just the beginning

IMPACT is supported by the European Community under the FP7 ICT Work Programme. The project is coordinated by the National Library of the Netherlands.

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Enjoy!