NewsEye / READ OCR training dataset from Austrian Newspapers (19th C.)

About the original data set

Austrian Newspapers is a ground truth data set created with Transkribus from Austrian newspapers by the Library Labs of the Austrian National Library (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek). See this publication for details:

Günter Mühlberger, & Günter Hackl. (2019). NewsEye / READ OCR training dataset from Austrian Newspapers (19th C.) [Data set]. Zenodo. http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3387369

The original data set was published under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license.

Austrian Newspapers 2.0.0 (April 2023)

A revision of the data set was carried out by Mannheim University Library from November 2022 to April 2023 using Transkribus. All transcriptions are provided as PAGE XML in the data folder. The original separation of the data set into TrainingSet_ONB_Newseye_GT_M1+ and ValidationSet_ONB_Newseye_GT_M1+ was kept.

The revision includes:

1. Layout correction of text regions, text lines and baselines.
2. Region labeling ("header", "headings", "paragraphs", "reference", "footer").
3. Correction and enhancement of transcriptions according to OCR-D Ground Truth Guidelines Level 2.

Statistics

Find more information about the revised dataset in our wiki.

Transcription guidelines:

The transcription rules are based on the OCR-D Ground Truth Guidelines Level 2 with some exceptions (see below):

1. Special characters:

   • Long s (ſ)
   • Fractions (¼ ½ ¾ ⅐ ⅑ ⅒ ⅓ ⅔ ⅕ ⅖ ⅗ ⅘ ⅙ ⅚ ⅛ ⅜ ⅝ ⅞)
   • Fraction slash (⁄) (U+2044), if
     • can't be transcribed by a unicode fraction representation
     • numerator and denominator are not on the same baseline height
   • R rotunda (ꝛ)
   • Dagger (†)
   • Black Right Pointing Index (☛)
   • Black Left Pointing Index (☚)
   • Superscript Numbers 0-9 (⁰ ¹ ² ³ ⁴ ⁵ ⁶ ⁷ ⁸ ⁹)
   • Subscript Numbers 0-9 (₀ ₁ ₂ ₃ ₄ ₅ ₆ ₇ ₈ ₉)
   • White square (□)
   • White medium square (◻)
   • Black square (■)
   • White up-pointing triangle (△)
   • Black up-pointing triangle (▲)
   • Bullet (•)
   • Black circle (●)
   • Black large circle (⬤)
   • Heavy four balloon-spoked asterisk (✤)

2. Additional characters transcribed true to original (contrary to OCR-D Level 2):

   • Double oblique hyphen (⸗)
   • Em dash (—) instead of En dash (–)

Funding

This revision is part of the OCR-D project and predominantly funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG).

Links

• [Original data set] NewsEye / READ OCR training dataset from Austrian Newspapers (19th C.)
• Library Labs @ Austrian Nation Library
• University Library Mannheim