OCR for Endangered Language Texts

There are thousands of books and documents containing text in endangered languages created by documentary linguists and language education programs, such as language learning textbooks and cultural texts. However, the vast majority are not widely accessible because they exist only as non-digitized printed books and handwritten notes. We’re building natural language processing (NLP) models to improve the accuracy of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems on low-resourced and endangered languages. This enables the extraction of text from these non-digitized documents, converting them into a machine-readable format and making them accessible and searchable online.