Humanities scholars increasingly rely on digital archives for their research instead of time-consuming visits to physical archives. This shift in research method has the hidden cost of working with digitally processed historical documents: how much trust can a scholar place in noisy representations of source texts? In a series of interviews with historians about their use of digital archives, w...

This paper examines the effects of strategic alliances on non-financial firms’ bank loan financing. We construct several measures to capture firms’ alliance activities using the frequency of alliance activities, the prominence of the alliance partner and the relative networking position in the overall alliance network. We find that firms with active alliance involvement experience a lower cost ...

This paper proposes a novel method for document enhancement. The method is based on the combination of two state-of-the-art filters through the construction of a mask. The mask is applied to a TV (Total Variation) regularized image where background noise has been reduced. The masked image is then filtered by NLmeans (Non Local Means) which reduces the noise in the text areas located by the mask...

We present richer typesetting models that extend the unsupervised historical document recognition system of BergKirkpatrick et al. (2013). The first model breaks the independence assumption between vertical offsets of neighboring glyphs and, in experiments, substantially decreases transcription error rates. The second model simultaneously learns multiple font styles and, as a result, is able to...

This paper explores a method for creating large-scale urban 3D models using Historical GIS data. The method is capable of automatically generating realistic VR models based on GIS data at a low cost. 3D models of houses are created from polygon data, fences from line data, and pedestrians and trees from point data. The method is applied to the Virtual Kyoto Project in which the landscape of the...

We analyzed historical and literary documents in Chinese to gain insights into research issues, and overview our studies which utilized four different sources of text materials in this paper. We investigated the history of concepts and transliterated words in China with the Database for the Study of Modern China Thought and Literature, which contains historical documents about China between 183...

Identifying the type of font (e.g., Roman, Blackletter) used in historical documents can help optical character recognition (OCR) systems produce more accurate text transcriptions. Towards this end, we present an activelearning strategy that can significantly reduce the number of labeled samples needed to train a font classifier. Our approach extracts image-based features that exploit geometric...

In this chapter, we propose a novel junction detection method in handwritten images, which uses the stroke-length distribution in every direction around a reference point inside the ink of texts. Our proposed junction detection method is simple and efficient, and yields a junction feature in a natural manner, which can be considered as a local descriptor. We apply our proposed junction detector...

In this chapter, we propose a novel junction detection method in handwritten images, which uses the stroke-length distribution in every direction around a reference point inside the ink of texts. Our proposed junction detection method is simple and efficient, and yields a junction feature in a natural manner, which can be considered as a local descriptor. We apply our proposed junction detector...

The online sports gambling industry employs teams of data analysts to build forecast models that turn the odds at sports games in their favour. While several betting strategies have been proposed to beat bookmakers, from expert prediction models and arbitrage strategies to odds bias exploitation, their returns have been inconsistent and it remains to be shown that a betting strategy can outperf...