NORTHAMPTON – The libraries of the world are rapidly being digitized as the contents of printed books, magazines and newspapers are transformed by machines into bytes of computer memory.
But in one area, handwritten text, which takes in everything from George Washington’s voluminous letters to pre-Gutenberg manuscripts, machines can still have a difficult time making sense of what they read.
Now researchers from Smith College and University of Massachusetts have developed an electronic method they say can transcribe handwritten documents with greater accuracy than any other system available.
Depending on the condition of the document (physicians’ jottings would likely be low on the readability scale), their method can achieve 85 percent accuracy, several percent better than the best existing method, said Nicholas R. Howe, an associate professor of computer sciences at Smith College.
Read the full article by Stan Freeman in the April 20, 2009 of Masslive.com.
