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Abstract
The notebooks in the Bleek and Lloyd collection contain handwritten stories that metaphorically encode the Bushman culture and are useful to researchers and scholars trying to understand Bushman language and culture. These notebooks, however, only exist as scanned images and therefore the stories they contain cannot be searched, indexed or compared. This research seeks to investigate how accurately the Bushman stories can be automatically converted from images to text, in a process known as transcription, and also to explore the various techniques for doing this. The expected contribution is a measurement of how accurately transcription can be automatically performed as well as a comparison of different techniques for doing this.
GET: [Research Proposal] [Research Proposal Presentation]
Research Outputs
[1] Kyle Williams and Hussein Suleman. 2011. Creating a Handwriting Recognition Corpus for Bushman Languages. In Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL '11), Volume 7008 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 222–231. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg (Honorable Mention).
GET: [SpringerLink] [Institutional Repository] [Slides]
[2] Kyle Williams and Hussein Suleman. 2011. Using a Hidden Markov model to Transcribe Handwritten Bushman Texts. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual International ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL '11) , pages 445-446, ACM, New York, NY, USA.
GET: [ACM] [Institutional Repository] [Poster] [Minute Madness Slide]
[3] Kyle Williams and Hussein Suleman. Learning to Read Bushman. In SAICSIT 2010 Postgraduate Symposium, Forever Resort Warmbaths, Bela-Bela, 11 October 2010.
GET [Institutional Repository] [Poster] [Slides]
[4] Kyle Williams. Feasibility of Automatic Transcription of Neatly Rewritten Bushman Texts. Technical Report CS10-06-00, Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town. 2010.
GET: [Institutional Repository]
Acknowledgements
This research is supported by the University of Cape Town, the Telkom/NSN/Telesciences/THRIP Center of Excellence and the National Research Foundation.
List of Readings for Masters
Masters
Learning to Read Bushman: Handwriting Recognition for Bushman Languages
Supervised by A/Prof. Hussein Suleman
Abstract
The notebooks in the Bleek and Lloyd collection contain handwritten stories that metaphorically encode the Bushman culture and are useful to researchers and scholars trying to understand Bushman language and culture. These notebooks, however, only exist as scanned images and therefore the stories they contain cannot be searched, indexed or compared. This research seeks to investigate how accurately the Bushman stories can be automatically converted from images to text, in a process known as transcription, and also to explore the various techniques for doing this. The expected contribution is a measurement of how accurately transcription can be automatically performed as well as a comparison of different techniques for doing this.
GET: [Research Proposal] [Research Proposal Presentation]
Research Outputs
[1] Kyle Williams and Hussein Suleman. 2011. Creating a Handwriting Recognition Corpus for Bushman Languages. In Proceedings of 13th International Conference on Asia-Pacific Digital Libraries (ICADL '11), Volume 7008 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 222–231. Springer Berlin / Heidelberg (Honorable Mention).
GET: [SpringerLink] [Institutional Repository] [Slides]
[2] Kyle Williams and Hussein Suleman. 2011. Using a Hidden Markov model to Transcribe Handwritten Bushman Texts. In Proceedings of the 11th Annual International ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL '11) , pages 445-446, ACM, New York, NY, USA.
GET: [ACM] [Institutional Repository] [Poster] [Minute Madness Slide]
[3] Kyle Williams and Hussein Suleman. Learning to Read Bushman. In SAICSIT 2010 Postgraduate Symposium, Forever Resort Warmbaths, Bela-Bela, 11 October 2010.
GET [Institutional Repository] [Poster] [Slides]
[4] Kyle Williams. Feasibility of Automatic Transcription of Neatly Rewritten Bushman Texts. Technical Report CS10-06-00, Department of Computer Science, University of Cape Town. 2010.
GET: [Institutional Repository]
Acknowledgements
This research is supported by the University of Cape Town, the Telkom/NSN/Telesciences/THRIP Center of Excellence and the National Research Foundation.
List of Readings for Masters