A-I-PoCoTo: Combining Automated and Interactive OCR Postcorrection

PoCoTo is known as a web-based interactive tool for the postcorrection of OCR-results on historical texts. In this paper we first introduce A-PoCoTo, a fully automated extension of PoCoTo designed for the use in large-scale digitization projects. Among other features, A-PoCoTo takes into account the recognition results of several OCR-engines on the given input text, and sentence context is used for refining rankings and decisions. Preliminary evaluation results are given. In view of the very high level of accuracy needed for many scholarly applications it is questionable if a fully automated process is always able to fully meet the standards expected by researchers in Digital Humanities. We describe the architecture of A-I-PoCoTo, a postcorrection system (under development) combining automated postcorrection as a first step and interactive postcorrection as an optional second step. In A-I-PoCoTo decisions and correction steps of the automated component are stored in a special protocol. Views offered by the graphical user interface help to efficiently confirm, reject, or improve these decisions as a first step of the manual postcorrection.