Abstract
Kwak'wala is an Indigenous language spoken in British Columbia, with a rich legacy of published documentation spanning more than a century, and an active community of speakers, teachers, and learners engaged in language revitalization. Over 11 volumes of the earliest texts created during the collaboration between Franz Boas and George Hunt have been scanned but remain unreadable by machines. Complete digitization through optical character recognition has the potential to facilitate transliteration into modern orthographies and the creation of other language technologies. In this paper, we apply the latest OCR techniques to a series of Kwak'wala texts only accessible as images, and discuss the challenges and unique adaptations necessary to make such technologies work for these real-world texts. Building on previous methods, we propose using a mix of off-the-shelf OCR methods, language identification, and masking to effectively isolate Kwak'wala text, along with post-correction models, to produce a final high-quality transcription.
Abstract (translated)
克瓦卡利语（Kwak'wala）是一种在不列颠哥伦比亚省使用的土著语言，拥有超过一个世纪的出版文献传统，并且有一个活跃的语言复兴社区，包括说者、教师和学习者。最早由弗朗茨·鲍亚斯与乔治·亨特合作创作的11卷文本已经被扫描，但机器仍无法读取这些资料。通过光学字符识别进行完整的数字化有可能促进现代正字法下的转写，并创建其他语言技术。在本文中，我们应用最新的OCR（光学字符识别）技术来处理一系列仅以图像形式存在的克瓦卡利语文本，并讨论将此类技术应用于实际文本时面临的挑战及必要的独特调整方法。基于以往的方法，我们建议结合现成的OCR方法、语言识别和屏蔽技术有效分离出克瓦卡利语文本，并使用后期校正模型生成高质量的转录版本。
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01775
