Related papers: Predicting the Past: Estimating Historical Apprais…
This paper discusses how to successfully digitize large-scale historical micro-data by augmenting optical character recognition (OCR) engines with pre- and post-processing methods. Although OCR software has improved dramatically in recent…
Thousands of users consult digital archives daily, but the information they can access is unrepresentative of the diversity of documentary history. The sequence-to-sequence architecture typically used for optical character recognition (OCR)…
Algorithmic fairness research often assumes a tradeoff between fairness and accuracy. Yet this tradeoff may not be universal. We test this assumption in the context of U.S. property tax assessment - a setting in which the output of…
This research digitizes and analyzes the Leidse hoogleraren en lectoren 1575-1815 books written between 1983 and 1985, which contain biographic data about professors and curators of Leiden University. It addresses the central question: how…
Despite their cultural and historical significance, Black digital archives continue to be a structurally underrepresented area in AI research and infrastructure. This is especially evident in efforts to digitize historical Black newspapers,…
Legal reform can be challenging in light of the volume, complexity, and interdependence of laws, codes, and records. One salient example of this challenge is the effort to restrict and remove racially restrictive covenants, clauses in…
Real estate appraisal, which is the process of estimating the price for real estate properties, is crucial for both buys and sellers as the basis for negotiation and transaction. Traditionally, the repeat sales model has been widely adopted…
Achieving robustness in recognition systems across diverse domains is crucial for their practical utility. While ample data availability is usually assumed, low-resource languages, such as ancient manuscripts and non-western languages, tend…
Iterating with new and improved OCR solutions enforces decision making when it comes to targeting the right candidates for reprocessing. This especially applies when the underlying data collection is of considerable size and rather diverse…
Good OCR results for historical printings rely on the availability of recognition models trained on diplomatic transcriptions as ground truth, which is both a scarce resource and time-consuming to generate. Instead of having to train a…
Historical studies of labor markets frequently lack data on individual income. The occupational income score (OCCSCORE) is often used as an alternative measure of labor market outcomes. We consider the consequences of using OCCSCORE when…
Despite the growing availability of big data in many fields, historical data on socioevironmental phenomena are often not available due to a lack of automated and scalable approaches for collecting, digitizing, and assembling them. We have…
Policy targets are being set increasingly for social and economic variables in the UK. This approach requires that reasonably successful ex ante forecasts can be made. We propose a general methodology for assessing the extent to which this…
In recent years several complaints about racial discrimination in appraising home values have been accumulating. For several decades, to estimate the sale price of the residential properties, appraisers have been walking through the…
Optical character recognition (OCR) and document understanding systems increasingly rely on large vision and vision-language models, yet evaluation remains centered on modern, Western, and institutional documents. This emphasis masks system…
Effects of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) quality on historical information retrieval have so far been studied in data-oriented scenarios regarding the effectiveness of retrieval results. Such studies have either focused on the effects…
Digitized archives contain and preserve the knowledge of generations of scholars in millions of documents. The size of these archives calls for automatic analysis since a manual analysis by specialists is often too expensive. In this paper,…
As the rental housing market moves online, the Internet offers divergent possible futures: either the promise of more-equal access to information for previously marginalized homeseekers, or a reproduction of longstanding information…
This paper investigates how to best compare algorithms for predicting chronic homelessness for the purpose of identifying good candidates for housing programs. Predictive methods can rapidly refer potentially chronic shelter users to…
Housing costs have a significant impact on individuals, families, businesses, and governments. Recently, online companies such as Zillow have developed proprietary systems that provide automated estimates of housing prices without the…