Making Latin Manuscripts Searchable using gHMMs

We describe a method that can make a scanned, handwritten mediaeval latin manuscript accessible to full text search. A generalized HMM is fitted, using transcribed latin to obtain a transition model and one example each of 22 letters to obtain an emission model. We show results for unigram, bigram and trigram models. Our method transcribes 25 pages of a manuscript of Terence with fair accuracy (75% of letters correctly transcribed). Search results are very strong; we use examples of variant spellings to demonstrate that the search respects the ink of the document. Furthermore, our model produces fair searches on a document from which we obtained no training data.