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I've thought about it, but haven't tried. As an experiment, we once tried converting an OCRed dictionary (this one: https://www.sil.org/resources/archives/1096
by mcswell 6y ago
I've thought about it, but haven't tried.
As an experiment, we once tried converting an OCRed dictionary (this one: https://www.sil.org/resources/archives/10969 https://www.sil.org/resources/archives/10969) into an XML dictionary database. (There are probably better ways to get an XML version of that particular dictionary, but as I say, this was an experiment.)
Despite the fact that it's a clean PDF, and uses a Latin script whose characters are quite similar to Spanish (and the glosses are in Spanish), the OCR was a major cause of problems: Treating the upside down exclamation as an 'i', failing to separate kerned characters, confusion between '1' and 'l', misinterpreting accented characters, and so on and so on. And for some reason the OCR was completely unable to distinguish bold from normal text, even though a human could do so standing several feet away.
So I did think of extracting the characters from the PDF. If it had been a real use case, instead of an experiment, I might have done so.
Write-up here: https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W17-0112/ https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/W17-0112/
- oddthink 6y agoInteresting! We're working on OCR on menu photos, which has some parallels in structure, but has a much smaller common vocabulary than a dictionary, almost by necessity. :-) Many menus are also available in PDF form, so we're trying to figure out if it's worth bothering with the PDF itself, or if we should just render to image and thus reduce the problem to the menu-photo one.