What do monks have in common, OCR, and goat cheese?

If you answer “ABBYY FineReader”, then you will be right. Some time ago, Father Gregory, the abbot of St. Gregory Palamas Monastery, contacted the ABBYY American office with a request to help solve the unusual problem that the monastery faced. The monastery has an archive of old documents in Greek with a politic dialectic system that needed to be digitized. Upon learning about this, our American colleagues presented the abbot with a box of ABBYY FineReader 10 Professional Edition . What kind of system is this and why did Father Grigory need FineReader - read under the cut.

Greek is one of the oldest written languages ​​in the world and has a rich history (details can be read at least on Wikipedia) Until 1982, a polytonic system was adopted in the written Greek language - superscripts and subscripts (they are called diacritical) were used to indicate accents and aspirations. It looks like this:



Since in modern oral Greek there are no aspirations and the types of stress are not distinguished, since 1982 a monotonic system with one stress mark has also been officially used in writing.

Recognizing documents in politic Greek is, in principle, not difficult, since most modern fonts contain characters with diacritics. The main thing for Father Gregory was to find a convenient program that would allow the monks to simplify the work of digitization as much as possible. The choice fell on ABBYY FineReader 10, which supports modern monotonic Greek with one accent mark. In addition, in FineReader, for recognizing non-standard diacritical stresses, one could use the ABBYY FineReader 10 Professional Edition template editor, which trains the program to recognize non-standard characters (we described this function in detail here ).

In the polytonic system of the Greek language, seven diacritical accents. Most of them and their most diverse combinations can be used with vowels of the Greek language. In total, a little more than two hundred possible combinations of characters with diacritical marks are obtained. It remained to train FineReader to recognize individual polytonic stresses and their combinations. Now the program is trained and the monks are ready to start work.

We hope that thanks to FineReader 10, the monks will be able to save one of the main treasures of the monastery - the ancient Greek texts - and they will be able to continue their ordinary life in prayer, teaching and work. In gratitude, ABBYY employees received fruits grown on the monastery grounds and carefully collected by the monks, the best goat cheese and smoked salmon they have ever tasted.

Alisa Rakhmanova,
Text Recognition Products Department