{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/optical-character-recognition-of-19th-century","title":"Optical Character Recognition of 19th Century Classical Commentaries: the Current State of Affairs","arxiv_id":"2110.06817","date":"2021-10-13","proceeding":null,"authors":["Matteo Romanello","Sven Najem-Meyer","Bruce Robertson"],"abstract":"Together with critical editions and translations, commentaries are one of the main genres of publication in literary and textual scholarship, and have a century-long tradition. Yet, the exploitation of thousands of digitized historical commentaries was hitherto hindered by the poor quality of Optical Character Recognition (OCR), especially on commentaries to Greek texts. In this paper, we evaluate the performances of two pipelines suitable for the OCR of historical classical commentaries. Our results show that Kraken + Ciaconna reaches a substantially lower character error rate (CER) than Tesseract/OCR-D on commentary sections with high density of polytonic Greek text (average CER 7% vs. 13%), while Tesseract/OCR-D is slightly more accurate than Kraken + Ciaconna on text sections written predominantly in Latin script (average CER 8.2% vs. 8.4%). As part of this paper, we also release GT4HistComment, a small dataset with OCR ground truth for 19th classical commentaries and Pogretra, a large collection of training data and pre-trained models for a wide variety of ancient Greek typefaces.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06817v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2110.06817v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"optical-character-recognition-of-19th-century","repo_url":"https://github.com/ajaxmulticommentary/gt-commentaries-ocr","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"optical-character-recognition","task_name":"Optical Character Recognition"},{"task_slug":"optical-character-recognition","task_name":"Optical Character Recognition (OCR)"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2110.06817","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2110.06817","mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}