Processing M.A. Castr\'en's Materials: Multilingual Typed and Handwritten Manuscripts

• Main Authors: Partanen, Niko, Rueter, Jack, Hämäläinen, Mika, Alnajjar, Khalid
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: 28-12-2021
• Subjects: Computer Science - Computation and Language
• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2112.14153

The study forms a technical report of various tasks that have been performed
on the materials collected and published by Finnish ethnographer and linguist,
Matthias Alexander Castr\'en (1813-1852). The Finno-Ugrian Society is
publishing Castr\'en's manuscripts as new critical and digital editions, and at
the same time different research groups have also paid attention to these
materials. We discuss the workflows and technical infrastructure used, and
consider how datasets that benefit different computational tasks could be
created to further improve the usability of these materials, and also to aid
the further processing of similar archived collections. We specifically focus
on the parts of the collections that are processed in a way that improves their
usability in more technical applications, complementing the earlier work on the
cultural and linguistic aspects of these materials. Most of these datasets are
openly available in Zenodo. The study points to specific areas where further
research is needed, and provides benchmarks for text recognition tasks.