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DuoSearch: A Novel Search Engine for Bulgarian Historical Documents

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Advances in Information Retrieval (ECIR 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13186))

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Abstract

Search in collections of digitised historical documents is hindered by a two-prong problem, orthographic variety and optical character recognition (OCR) mistakes. We present a new search engine for historical documents, DuoSearch, which uses ElasticSearch and machine learning methods based on deep neural networks to offer a solution to this problem. It was tested on a collection of historical newspapers in Bulgarian from the mid-19th to the mid-20th century. The system provides an interactive and intuitive interface for the end-users allowing them to enter search terms in modern Bulgarian and search across historical spellings. This is the first solution facilitating the use of digitised historical documents in Bulgarian.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://github.com/angelbeshirov/DuoSearch.

  2. 2.

    http://ec2-3-250-238-254.eu-west-1.compute.amazonaws.com:8080.

References

  1. Doucet, A., et al.: NewsEye: a digital investigator for historical newspapers. In: Digital Humanities 2020, DH 2020, Conference Abstracts, Ottawa, Canada, 22–24 July 2020. Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). https://zenodo.org/record/3895269 (2020)

  2. Rigaud, C., Doucet, A., Coustaty, M., Moreux, J.P.: ICDAR 2019 competition on post-OCR text correction. In: 2019 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR) (2019). https://doi.org/10.1109/icdar.2019.00255

  3. Devlin, J., Chang, M.-W., Lee, K., Toutanova, K.: BERT: pre-training of deep bidirectional transformers for language understanding arxiv:1810.04805 (2018)

  4. Allen, R.B.: Toward a platform for working with sets of digitized historical newspapers. In: IFLA International Newspaper Conference: Digital Preservation and Access to News and Views, New Delhi, pp. 54–59 (2010)

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  5. Cole, B.: The National Digital Newspaper Program. Organization of American Historians Newsletter 32 (2004)

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  6. Oberbichler, S., et al.: Integrated interdisciplinary workflows for research on historical newspapers: perspectives from humanities scholars, computer scientists, and librarians. J. Assoc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 1–15 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.24565

  7. CLaDA-BG dictionary, Grant number DO01-164/28.08.2018. https://clada-bg.eu

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Acknowledgements

This research is partially supported by Project UNITe BG05M2OP001-1.001-0004 funded by the OP “Shcience and Education for Smart Growth” and co-funded by the EU through the ESI Funds. The contribution of M. Dobreva is supported by the project KP-06-DB/6 DISTILL funded by the NSF of Bulgaria.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Sofia, Bulgaria

    Angel Beshirov, Suzan Hadzhieva, Ivan Koychev & Milena Dobreva

Authors
  1. Angel Beshirov
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  2. Suzan Hadzhieva
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  3. Ivan Koychev
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  4. Milena Dobreva
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Angel Beshirov .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, Halle, Germany

    Matthias Hagen

  2. Leiden University, Leiden, The Netherlands

    Suzan Verberne

  3. University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Craig Macdonald

  4. University of Duisburg-Essen, Essen, Germany

    Christin Seifert

  5. University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway

    Krisztian Balog

  6. Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway

    Kjetil Nørvåg

  7. University of Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway

    Vinay Setty

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Beshirov, A., Hadzhieva, S., Koychev, I., Dobreva, M. (2022). DuoSearch: A Novel Search Engine for Bulgarian Historical Documents. In: Hagen, M., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13186. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99739-7_31

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-99739-7_31

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-030-99738-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-030-99739-7

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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