A system for assisted transcription and annotation of ancient documents

Computer assisted transcription tools can speed up the process of reading and transcribing texts. At the same time, new annotation tools open new ways of accessing the text in its graphical form. STATE, an assisted transcription system for ancient documents, offers a multimodal interaction environment to assist humans in transcribing documents: the user can type, write on the screen or utter a word. When one of these actions is used to correct an erroneous word, the system uses this new information to look for other mistakes. The system is modular: creation of projects from a set of images of documents, an automatic transcription system, and user interaction with the transcriptions to easily correct them as needed. This division of labor allows great flexibility for organizing the work in a team of transcribers. Our immediate goals are to improve the recognition system and to enrich the obtained transcriptions with scholarly descriptions.