Classification of Untranscribed Handwritten Notarial Documents by Textual Contents

Huge amounts of digital page images of important manuscripts are preserved in archives worldwide. The amounts are so large that it is generally unfeasible for archivists to adequately tag most of the documents with the required metadata so as to allow proper organization of the archives and effective exploration by scholars and the general public. The class or “typology” of a document is perhaps the most important tag to be included in the metadata. The technical problem is one of automatic classification of documents, each consisting of a set of untranscribed handwritten text images, by the textual contents of the images. The approach considered is based on “probabilistic indexing”, a relatively novel technology which allows to effectively represent the intrinsic word-level uncertainty exhibited by handwritten text images. We assess the performance of this approach on a large collection of complex notarial manuscripts from the Spanish Archivo Histórico Provincial de Cádiz, with promising results.