On 12 August 2014 17:25, Nick White <nick.white@durham.ac.uk> wrote:
> Dear Wikisourcerers,
>
> It's good to hear from you. Wikisource is awesome, as far as I am
> concerned.
>
>> One
>> of the most serious issues was raised by the Belarusian community which uses 2
>> different scripts with no commercial OCR support. This means that the
>> volunteers have to type each word manually. We wondered if it would be possible
>> to train Tesseract to recognize these old texts using the text that has been
>> already typed.
>
> Actually, Tesseract should already have support for Russian and
> Belarussian "out of the box"; see the 'rus' and 'bel' training data.
>

'bel' contains Cyrillic; there is also a Latin script ('Łacinka') for
Belarusian. (Russian is widely spoken in Belarus, but Russian texts
would be added to the Russian Wikisource).

The question I'd have for the Belarusian Wikisourcers is: can they be
treated as having an exact mapping? (It doesn't need to be 1:1, I'm
aware that, e.g., 'нь' maps to 'ń'). I ask because, as I remember it,
there's very little text in Łacinka, and adapting Cyrillic material
could be useful.

> One thing that wikisource could potentially do for us would be
> provide loads of proofread, freely reusable "ground truth" data to
> test Tesseract with. Are there programatic ways of getting at the
> data, for example downloading all page images and corresponding text
> that is marked as green, for a specific language / script?

They're all added to a category, so that part should be pretty easy.

--
<Sefam> Are any of the mentors around?
<jimregan> yes, they're the ones trolling you