Abstract
Results of digitisation projects sometimes suffer from the limitations of optical character recognition software which is mainly designed for modern texts. Prior work has examined the impact of OCR errors on information retrieval (IR) and downstream natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, questions remain open regarding the actual readability of the OCRed text to the end users, especially, considering that traditional OCR quality metrics consider only syntactic or surface features and are quite limited. This paper proposes a novel dataset and conducts a pilot study to investigate these questions.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
- 5.
- 6.
The three annotators are sophomores, two of them are law students, and one is an information technology student.
References
Abdulkader, A., Casey, M.R.: Low cost correction of OCR errors using learning in a multi-engine environment. In: 10th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, ICDAR 2009, pp. 576–580. IEEE Computer Society (2009)
Bazzo, G.T., Lorentz, G.A., Suarez Vargas, D., Moreira, V.P.: Assessing the impact of OCR errors in information retrieval. In: Jose, J.M., et al. (eds.) ECIR 2020. LNCS, vol. 12036, pp. 102–109. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45442-5_13
Bird, S.: NLTK: the natural language toolkit. In: Proceedings of the COLING/ACL 2006 Interactive Presentation Sessions, pp. 69–72 (2006)
Boros, E., et al.: Alleviating digitization errors in named entity recognition for historical documents. In: Proceedings of the 24th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, CoNLL 2020, pp. 431–441. Association for Computational Linguistics (2020)
Chiron, G., Doucet, A., Coustaty, M., Moreux, J.P.: ICDAR 2017 competition on post-OCR text correction. In: 14th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition, pp. 1423–1428. IEEE (2017)
Crossley, S.A., Skalicky, S., Dascalu, M., McNamara, D.S., Kyle, K.: Predicting text comprehension, processing, and familiarity in adult readers: new approaches to readability formulas. Discourse Process. 54(5–6), 340–359 (2017)
Dale, E., Chall, J.S.: A formula for predicting readability: instructions. Educ. Res. Bull. 27, 37–54 (1948)
Devlin, J., Chang, M., Lee, K., Toutanova, K.: BERT: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding. In: Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, NAACL-HLT 2019), pp. 4171–4186. Association for Computational Linguistics (2019)
Kincaid, J.P., Fishburne, R.P., Jr., Rogers, R.L., Chissom, B.S.: Derivation of new readability formulas (automated readability index, fog count and flesch reading ease formula) for Navy enlisted personnel. Tech. rep, Naval Technical Training Command Millington TN Research Branch (1975)
Koo, T., Li, M.: A guideline of selecting and reporting intraclass correlation coefficients for reliability research. J. Chiropr. Med. 15(2), 155–163 (2016)
Martinc, M., Pollak, S., Robnik-Šikonja, M.: Supervised and unsupervised neural approaches to text readability. Comput. Linguist. 47(1), 141–179 (2021)
Nguyen, T.T.H., Jatowt, A., Coustaty, M., Doucet, A.: Survey of post-OCR processing approaches. ACM Comput. Surv. 54(6), 1–37 (2021)
Nguyen, T., Jatowt, A., Coustaty, M., Nguyen, N., Doucet, A.: Deep statistical analysis of OCR errors for effective post-OCR processing. In: 19th ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, pp. 29–38 (2019)
Linhares Pontes, E., Hamdi, A., Sidere, N., Doucet, A.: Impact of OCR quality on named entity linking. In: Jatowt, A., Maeda, A., Syn, S.Y. (eds.) ICADL 2019. LNCS, vol. 11853, pp. 102–115. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34058-2_11
Ranganathan, P., Pramesh, C., Aggarwal, R.: Common pitfalls in statistical analysis: measures of agreement. Perspect. Clin. Res. 8, 187 (2017)
Shrout, P.E., Fleiss, J.L.: Intraclass correlations: uses in assessing rater reliability. Psychol. Bull. 86(2), 420 (1979)
van Strien, D., Beelen, K., Ardanuy, M.C., Hosseini, K., McGillivray, B., Colavizza, G.: Assessing the impact of OCR quality on downstream NLP tasks. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence, ICAART 2020. pp. 484–496. SCITEPRESS (2020)
Traub, M.C., van Ossenbruggen, J., Hardman, L.: Impact analysis of OCR quality on research tasks in digital archives. In: Kapidakis, S., Mazurek, C., Werla, M. (eds.) TPDL 2015. LNCS, vol. 9316, pp. 252–263. Springer, Cham (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24592-8_19
Vajjala, S., Lučić, I.: OneStopEnglish corpus: a new corpus for automatic readability assessment and text simplification. In: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Workshop on Innovative Use of NLP for Building Educational Applications, pp. 297–304 (2018)
Vajjala, S., Meurers, D.: On improving the accuracy of readability classification using insights from second language acquisition. In: Proceedings of the Seventh Workshop on Building Educational Applications Using NLP, pp. 163–173 (2012)
Xu, W., Callison-Burch, C., Napoles, C.: Problems in current text simplification research: new data can help. Trans. Assoc. Comput. Linguist. 3, 283–297 (2015)
Yang, Z., Yang, D., Dyer, C., He, X., Smola, A., Hovy, E.: Hierarchical attention networks for document classification, pp. 1480–1489. Association for Computational Linguistics, San Diego (2016)
Acknowledgements
This work has been supported by the “ANNA” and “Au-delà des Pyrénées” projects funded by the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Nguyen, H.T.T., Jatowt, A., Coustaty, M., Doucet, A. (2022). ReadOCR: A Novel Dataset and Readability Assessment of OCRed Texts. In: Uchida, S., Barney, E., Eglin, V. (eds) Document Analysis Systems. DAS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13237. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06555-2_32
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06555-2_32
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-06554-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-06555-2
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)