Correcting Whitespace Errors in Digitized Historical Texts

Code

• github.com/sandeepsoni/whitespace-normalizer
  OfficialIn papernone★ 0

Abstract

Whitespace errors are common to digitized archives. This paper describes a lightweight unsupervised technique for recovering the original whitespace. Our approach is based on count statistics from Google n-grams, which are converted into a likelihood ratio test computed from interpolated trigram and bigram probabilities. To evaluate this approach, we annotate a small corpus of whitespace errors in a digitized corpus of newspapers from the 19th century United States. Our technique identifies and corrects most whitespace errors while introducing a minimal amount of oversegmentation: it achieves 77\% recall at a false positive rate of less than 1\%, and 91\% recall at a false positive rate of less than 3\%.

Reproductions