Extracting Information from Historical Genealogical Documents

How HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) and Related Technologies Are Empowering Family Discoveries

Overview

This article explains how Machine Learning (ML) technologies such as HTR (Handwritten Text Recognition) and NLP (Natural Language Processing) are improving people’s prospects for learning about their family’s roots via historical documents. It also outlines some of the difficult (yet worthwhile) problems which remain for ML researchers to solve.

Introduction

Our world is awash in digital content. It is quite possible there is more new text authored …

editors pick genealogy handwriting-recognition information naturallanguageprocessing