Normalized vs Diplomatic Annotation: A Case Study of Automatic Information Extraction from Handwritten Uruguayan Birth Certificates
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Jul 11, 2025
Abstract
This study evaluates the recently proposed Document Attention Network (DAN)
for extracting key-value information from Uruguayan birth certificates,
handwritten in Spanish. We investigate two annotation strategies for
automatically transcribing handwritten documents, fine-tuning DAN with minimal
training data and annotation effort. Experiments were conducted on two datasets
containing the same images (201 scans of birth certificates written by more
than 15 different writers) but with different annotation methods. Our findings
indicate that normalized annotation is more effective for fields that can be
standardized, such as dates and places of birth, whereas diplomatic annotation
performs much better for fields containing names and surnames, which can not be
standardized.
