What language(s) is the model tested on?
Dutch and Spanish
Due to the nature of human language, historical documents are hard to comprehend by contemporary people. This limits their accessibility to scholars specialized in the time period in which the documents were written. Modernization aims at breaking this language barrier by generating a new version of a historical document, written in the modern version of the document's original language. However, while it is able to increase the document's comprehension, modernization is still far from producing an error-free version. In this work, we propose a collaborative framework in which a scholar can work together with the machine to generate the new version. We tested our approach on a simulated environment, achieving significant reductions of the human effort needed to produce the modernized version of the document.
In recent years, awareness of the importance of preserving our cultural heritage has increased. Historical documents are an important part of that heritage. In order to preserve them, there is an increased need in creating digital text versions which can be search and automatically processed BIBREF0. However, their linguistic properties create additional difficulties: due to the lack of a spelling convention, orthography changes depending on the time period and author. Furthermore, human language evolves with the passage of time, increasing the difficulty of the document's comprehension. Thus, historical documents are mostly accessible to scholars specialized in the time period in which each document was written. Modernization tackles the language barrier in order to increase the accessibility of historical documents. To achieve this, it generates a new version of a historical document in the modern version of the language in which the document was originally written (fi:Shakespeare shows an example of modernizing a document). However, while modernization has been successful in order to increase the comprehension of historical documents BIBREF1, BIBREF2, it is still far from creating error-free modern versions. Therefore, this task still needs to be carried out by scholars. Interactive machine translation (IMT) fosters human–computer collaborations to generate error-free translations in a productive way BIBREF4, BIBREF5. In this work, we proposed to apply one of these protocols to historical documents modernization. We strive for creating an error-free modern version of a historical document, decreasing the human effort needed to achieve this goal. The rest of this document is structured as follows: se:work introduces the related work. Then, in se:IMT we present our protocol. se:exp describes the experiments conducted in order to assess our proposal. The results of those experiments are presented and discussed in se:res. Finally, in se:conc, conclusions are drawn.