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arXiv Computation and Language

Mining the Nineteenth Century for the Thirteenth: Register-Scale Forced Alignment and HTR Bootstrapping via Legacy Regesta and Antiquarian Editions

The study evaluates how nineteenth‑century scholarship—specifically Pressutti’s regesta and partial editions—can aid handwritten text recognition (HTR) of Pope Honorius III’s registers beyond the limited modern expert transcriptions available for regnal years 1‑2. By aligning legacy layers with modern source lines, the authors demonstrate that projection onto curial spelling with replay reduces word‑error rate by 1.50 points, that a legacy lexicon covers 82.2 % of out‑of‑vocabulary words and flags errors with 66.7 % precision, and that a distilled medieval NER model achieves an F1 of 82.1 % on a validated benchmark. Additionally, Pressutti’s regesta and related topological data recover 73.9 % of entry starts and suggest a character‑error rate of 7.80 % beyond folio 203, indicating that antiquarian scholarship can steer, check, and segment HTR rather than replace modern transcription.

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Mining the Nineteenth Century for the Thirteenth: Register-Scale Forced Alignment and HTR Bootstrapping via Legacy Regesta and Antiquarian Editions

The paper investigates how nineteenth‑century scholarship—specifically Pressutti’s regesta and partial editions—can aid handwritten text recognition (HTR) for the registers of Pope Honorius III, which lack modern expert transcriptions beyond regnal years 1‑2. By comparing legacy layers to audited transcriptions, the authors identify a three‑tier division of labor: at the orthographic tier, projecting legacy editions onto curial spelling with replay reduces word‑error rate by 1.5 points; at the lexical tier, a legacy lexicon covers 82.2 % of out‑of‑vocabulary words and improves NER performance; and at the topological tier, regesta data help locate entry starts with 73.9 % coverage and estimate a character‑error rate of 7.80 % beyond folio 203. The study shows that while antiquarian scholarship cannot replace modern transcription, it can effectively steer, verify, and segment HTR across untranscribed registers.

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