Man's respect for knowledge is one of his most pecu liar characteristics. Knowledge in Latin is scientia, and science came to be the name of the most respe ctable kind of knowledge. But what distinguishes knowledge from superstition, ideology r pseudoscience? The Catholic Church excommunicated Copernicans, the Communist Party per secuted Mendelians on the ground that their doctrines were pseudoscientific. But then the problem of the demarcation between science and pseudoscience is not merely a problem of armcha ir p ilosophy: it is of vital social and political relevance.

Science and pseudoscience

Nowadays, deep learning methods are employed in a broad range of research fields. The analysis and recognition of historical documents, as we survey in this work, is not an exception. Our study analyzes the papers published in the last few years on this topic from different perspectives: we first provide a pragmatic definition of historical documents from the point of view of the research in the area, then we look at the various sub-tasks addressed in this research. Guided by these tasks, we go through the different input-output relations that are expected from the used deep learning approaches and therefore we accordingly describe the most used models. We also discuss research datasets published in the field and their applications. This analysis shows that the latest research is a leap forward since it is not the simple use of recently proposed algorithms to previous problems, but novel tasks and novel applications of state of the art methods are now considered. Rather than just providing a conclusive picture of the current research in the topic we lastly suggest some potential future trends that can represent a stimulus for innovative research directions.

Deep Learning for Historical Document Analysis and Recognition—A Survey

This paper introduces a new way for text-line extraction by integrating deep-learning based pre-classification and state-of-the-art segmentation methods. Text-line extraction in complex handwritten documents poses a significant challenge, even to the most modern computer vision algorithms. Historical manuscripts are a particularly hard class of documents as they present several forms of noise, such as degradation, bleed-through, interlinear glosses, and elaborated scripts. In this work, we propose a novel method which uses semantic segmentation at pixel level as intermediate task, followed by a text-line extraction step. We measured the performance of our method on a recent dataset of challenging medieval manuscripts and surpassed state-of-the-art results by reducing the error by 80.7%. Furthermore, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on various other datasets written in different scripts. Hence, our contribution is two-fold. First, we demonstrate that semantic pixel segmentation can be used as strong denoising pre-processing step before performing text line extraction. Second, we introduce a novel, simple and robust algorithm that leverages the high-quality semantic segmentation to achieve a text-line extraction performance of 99.42% line IU on a challenging dataset.

Labeling, Cutting, Grouping: An Efficient Text Line Segmentation Method for Medieval Manuscripts

Word2Vec is a prominent model for natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Similar nspiration is found in distributed embeddings for new state-of-the-art (SotA) deep neural networks.  However, wron ...

Word2Vec: Optimal Hyper-Parameters and Their Impact on NLP Downstream Tasks

Labeling, Cutting, Grouping: an Efficient Text Line Segmentation Method for Medieval Manuscripts

This essay discusses current research efforts in conversational systems from the philosophy of science point of view and evaluates some conversational systems research activities from the standpoint of naturalism philosophical theory. Conversational systems or chatbots have advanced over the decades and now have become mainstream applications. They are software that users can communicate with, using natural language. Particular attention is given to the Alime Chat conversational system, already in industrial use, and the related research. The competitive nature of systems in production is a result of different researchers and developers trying to produce new conversational systems that can outperform previous or state-of-the-art systems. Different factors affect the quality of the conversational systems produced, and how one system is assessed as being better than another is a function of objectivity and of the relevant experimental results. This essay examines the research practices from, among others, Longino’s view on objectivity and Popper’s stand on falsification. Furthermore, the need for qualitative and large datasets is emphasized. This is in addition to the importance of the peer-review process in scientific publishing, as a means of developing, validating, or rejecting theories, claims, or methodologies in the research community. In conclusion, open data and open scientific discussion fora should become more prominent over the mere publication-focused trend.

https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/4/3/41/pdf

Conversational Systems in Machine Learning from the Point of View of the Philosophy of Science—Using Alime Chat and Related Studies

This article makes the case for more objectivity in Machine Learning (ML) research. Any research work that claims to hold benefits has to be scrutinized based on many parameters, such as the methodology employed, ethical considerations and its theoretical or technical contribution. We approach this discussion from a Naturalist philosophical outlook. Although every analysis may be subjective, it is important for the research community to keep vetting the research for continuous growth and to produce even better work. We suggest standardizing some of the steps in ML research in an objective way and being aware of various biases threatening objectivity. The ideal of objectivity keeps research rational since objectivity requires beliefs to be based on facts. We discuss some of the current challenges, the role of objectivity in the two elements (product and process) that are up for consideration in ML and make recommendations to support the research community.

https://www.mdpi.com/2409-9287/6/1/22/pdf

Understanding the Role of Objectivity in Machine Learning and Research Evaluation

Abstract Word2Vec is a prominent model for natural language processing tasks. Similar inspiration is found in distributed embeddings (word-vectors) in recent state-of-the-art deep neural networks. However, wrong combination of hyperparameters can produce embeddings with poor quality. The objective of this work is to empirically show that Word2Vec optimal combination of hyper-parameters exists and evaluate various combinations. We compare them with the publicly released, original Word2Vec embedding. Both intrinsic and extrinsic (downstream) evaluations are carried out, including named entity recognition and sentiment analysis. Our main contributions include showing that the best model is usually task-specific, high analogy scores do not necessarily correlate positively with F1 scores, and performance is not dependent on data size alone. If ethical considerations to save time, energy, and the environment are made, then relatively smaller corpora may do just as well or even better in some cases. Increasing the dimension size of embeddings after a point leads to poor quality or performance. In addition, using a relatively small corpus, we obtain better WordSim scores, corresponding Spearman correlation, and better downstream performances (with significance tests) compared to the original model, which is trained on a 100 billion-word corpus.

Word2Vec: Optimal hyperparameters and their impact on natural language processing downstream tasks

In this paper, we present a large historical database of Chinese family records with the aim to develop robust systems for historical document analysis. In this direction, we propose a Historical Document Reading Challenge on Large Chinese Structured Family Records (ICDAR 2019 HDRCCHINESE). The objective of the competition is to recognize and analyze the layout, and finally detect and recognize the textlines and characters of the large historical document image dataset containing more than 100000 pages. Cascade R-CNN, CRNN, and U-Net based architectures were trained to evaluate the performances in these tasks. Error rate of 0.01 has been recorded for textline recognition (Task1) whereas a Jaccard Index of 99:54% has been recorded for layout analysis (Task2). The graph edit distance based total error ratio of 1:5% has been recorded for complete integrated textline detection and recognition (Task3).

Foteini Liwicki

Papers

Conversational Systems in Machine Learning from the Point of View of the Philosophy of Science—Using Alime Chat and Related Studies

Word2Vec: Optimal Hyper-Parameters and Their Impact on NLP Downstream Tasks

Understanding the Role of Objectivity in Machine Learning and Research Evaluation

Word2Vec: Optimal hyperparameters and their impact on natural language processing downstream tasks

ICDAR 2019 Historical Document Reading Challenge on Large Structured Chinese Family Records