Machine learning methods for automatically processing historical documents: from paper acquisition to XML transformation

One of the aims of the EU project COLLATE is to design and implement a Web-based collaboratory for archives, scientists and end-users working with digitized cultural material. Since the originals of such a material are often unique and scattered in various archives, severe problems arise for their wide fruition. A solution would be to develop intelligent document processing tools that automatically transform printed documents into a Web-accessible form such as XML. Here, we propose the use of a document processing system, WISDOM++, which uses heavily machine learning techniques in order to perform such a task, and report promising results obtained in preliminary experiments.