Best News: When Artificial Intelligence Makes Handwriting Legible

When Artificial Intelligence Makes Handwriting Legible

 

Computers can learn to recognize and transcribe individual handwriting. Thousands of documents are made accessible for full-text searches.

Handwriting varies from person to person. The Transkribus platform co-developed at the University of Innsbruck can still decipher them. With artificial intelligence, the texts are made machine-readable and accessible to researchers and the interested public, as the university reported in a statement on Tuesday.

Countless historical manuscripts are kept in archives and libraries. “Searching through these documents by hand can be a very tedious task,” explains Dr. Günter Mühlberger from the Digitization/Archiving working group at the University of Innsbruck. In addition, many of the sources were written in scripts that are no longer legible today, such as the Kurrent script, a cursive script developed in the 16th century and used up to the middle of the 20th century.

According to Mühlberger, the Transkribus platform can automatically recognize and transcribe these manuscripts and thus make them legible for everyone. The fact that the digitized texts are machine-readable allows a full-text search, so that hundreds or thousands of documents can be checked for keywords at the same time.

How the Transkribus platform works

Transkribus works with neural networks that no longer have to be specially programmed for a specific handwriting. If a suitable model does not already exist, the machine can learn from sample texts from users to transcribe handwriting and is then able to reliably make further text legible. The technology used is independent of the language and the actual font. Medieval scripts and even Hebrew, Arabic or Indic scripts could also be edited. Experiments with ancient Chinese were in progress.

Transkribus was developed with the support of the European Union and has been operated since 2019 by the European cooperative READ-Coop, which was co-founded by the University of Innsbruck and, according to the university, now has more than 120 members from 27 countries. A recent study by the University of Edinburgh revealed that over 400 scientific publications that use Transkribus have now appeared. The Transkribus platform itself has over 90,000 users.

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