Subject: Re: status

From: [email-masked] (Lewis Lancaster)
Date: Fri, 15 Oct 93 08:46:02 -0700

From: Lewis Lancaster
	In the Buddhist text projects, we have tried a
number of OCR approaches.  Twice, I saw demonstrations
in the national computer laboratory in Taiwan.  At the
moment, typists can input 30-60 characters a minute in
China with an accuracy rate that far exceeds the OCR.
The speed of input and final proofing is far better
with typing in the characters.  Unless the OCR reads
in the 99% level, the corrections take much longer
than doing manual input.  
	With roman letters in the Pali canon input, we
found that double typing was the answer.  By matching
the two type examples on the screen, we eliminate most
of the errors, except for a few that are made in common.
When Academia Sinica in Taipei did the Chinese dynastic
history data base (40 million characters), they experimented
with double typing the characters.  In the case of Chinese
up to 40% of the errors were made in common by both
typists, since both were trained to expect a certain form
they both accepted that they were in fact seeing that
form.  With Roman letters or the Greek alphabet, we have
many examples of input by people who cannot read the
language, but in the case of Chinese we have no program
that allows input by someone who does not know how to
read the character.