Comparing Different Feedback Modalities in Assisted Transcription of Manuscripts

Transcription of handwritten text can be speed-up by using off-line Handwritten Text Recognition techniques, that allow the obtention of an initial draft transcription of an image with handwritten text. However, this draft transcription usually contains errors that must be amended by the transcriber by providing a feedback signal. The usual approach is post-edition, where each error is corrected without modifying the rest of the current transcription. A more sophisticated approach can employ the current modification to provide a new whole transcription, hopefully with less errors. Apart from that, feedback can be provided in different modalities: keyboard input, on-line handwritten text, or speech. Each of these modalities presents different features with respect to ambiguity, derived errors, and final transcription time. In this work we study how the different modalities behave in the assisted transcription of a historical handwritten text document in Spanish and we evaluate their transcription productivity.