OF THE MANY FORMS OF REALIA AT THE DISPOSAL of the French teacher, the feature film can be the most engaging and rewarding. Nothing holds students' attention quite like a movie or gives them as vivid an experience of France, short of going abroad. Moreover, movies can furnish glimpses of milieus and personalities the average tourist or student rarely encounters. Instructors have been quick to m...

The role of computational methods in the determination of authorship of historical manuscripts is considered. During the last few years the computational forensics community has developed automation tools for forensic document examination, in particular for determining whether a given handwriting specimen can be attributed to known writing. We describe how these methods can be used with histori...

In this paper we present the PRiSMHA project, whose main goal is to demonstrate that a rich semantic representation of the content of historical documents is useful since it can significantly improve the access to archival resources and sustainable thanks to a crowdsourcing approach. This goal poses interesting research challenges, both for the semantic model definition and the user interaction...

The extraction of relevant information from historical document collections is one of the key steps in order to make these documents available for access and searches. The usual approach combines transcription and grammars in order to extract semantically meaningful entities. In this paper, we describe a new method to obtain word categories directly from non-preprocessed handwritten word images...

This paper describes the system WHUSUM we developed to participate in the update summarization task of TAC 2009. Given a topic and corresponding topic statement, this year's task is to write 2 summaries (one for Document Set A and one for Document Set B) that meet the information need expressed in the topic statement. In order to generate a topic-oriented summary for Set A, We present a co-trai...

The evolution of infrastructure networks such as roads and streets are of utmost importance to understand the evolution of urban systems. However, datasets describing these spatial objects are rare and sparse. The database presented here represents the road network at the french national level described in the historical map of Cassini in the 18th century. The digitization of this historical ma...

In this paper we present a new approach for text line segmentation that works directly on gray-scale document images. Our algorithm constructs distance transform directly on the gray-scale images, which is used to compute two types of seams: medial seams and separating seams. A medial seam is a chain of pixels that crosses the text area of a text line and a separating seam is a path that passes...

In this talk, the key components of a multifunctional historical document research system are discussed. An ongoing project which aims at creating a representative corpus of documents that reflect the impact of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in the period 1865-1945 forms the case study for the research system. The realisation of the system includes several working fields: the collec...

With the new interest in historical documents insight grew that electronic access to these texts causes many specific problems. In the first part of the paper we survey the present role of digital historical documents. After collecting central facts and observations on historical language change we comment on the difficulties that result for retrieval and data mining on historical texts. In the...

In mechanical speech synthesis from the 18 up to the 20 century, reed pipes were mainly used for the generation of the voice and the organ stop vox humana was central in this process. This has been described in different historical documents which report that the vox humana in some organs sounded like human vowels. In this study, tones of four different voces humanae were recorded to investigat...