Dear Applied Statistics Workshop Community,
Just a quick reminder, our next meeting is Wednesday, April 10 (12:00 EST).
Melissa Dell presents “Efficient OCR for Building a Diverse Digital
History.”
<When>
April 10, 12:00 to 1:30 PM, EST
Lunch will be available for pick-up inside CGIS K354.
<Where>
In-person: CGIS K354
Zoom:
https://harvard.zoom.us/j/93217566507?pwd=elBwYjRJcWhlVE5teE1VNDZoUXdjQT09
<Abstract>
Thousands of users consult digital archives daily, but the information they
can access is unrepresentative of the diversity of documentary history. The
sequence-to-sequence architecture typically used for optical character
recognition (OCR) – which jointly learns a vision and language model - is
poorly extensible to low-resource document collections, as learning a
language-vision model requires extensive labeled sequences and compute.
This study models OCR as a character level image retrieval problem, using a
contrastively trained vision encoder. Because the model only learns
characters’ visual features, it is more sample efficient and extensible
than existing architectures, enabling accurate OCR in settings where
existing solutions fail. Crucially, the model opens new avenues for
community engagement in making digital history more representative of
documentary history. Beyond OCR, the presentation will also discuss how
large differences in sample efficiency across different neural network
architectures influence the types of learning that are often most suited
towards academic applications, particular for low resource settings.
<2023-2024 Schedule>
GOV 3009 Website:
https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/applied.stats.workshop-gov3009
Calendar:
https://calendar.google.com/calendar/u/0?cid=Y18zdjkzcGF2OWZqa2tsZHJidTlzbm…
Best,
Jialu
--
Jialu Li
Department of Government
Harvard University
*https://jialul.github.io/ <https://jialul.github.io/>*