Computer users are digitizing books quickly and accurately with Carnegie Mellon method
August 14, 2008Millions of computer users collectively transcribe the equivalent of 160 books each day with better than 99 percent accuracy, despite the fact that few spend more than a few seconds on the task and that most do not realize they are doing valuable work, Carnegie Mellon University researchers reported today in Science Express.
They can work so prodigiously because Carnegie Mellon computer scientists led by Luis von Ahn have taken a widely used Web site security measure, called a CAPTCHA, and given it a second purpose — digitizing books produced prior to the computer age. When Web visitors solve one of the distorted-letter puzzles so they can register for email or post a comment on a blog, they simultaneously help turn the printed word into machine-readable text.
More than a year after implementing their version, called reCAPTCHA, http://recaptcha.net/ on thousands of Web sites worldwide, the researchers conclude that their word deciphering process achieves the industry standard for human transcription services — better than 99 percent accuracy. Their report, published online today, will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Science.
Furthermore, the amount of work that can be accomplished is herculean. More than 100 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day and, though each puzzle takes only a few seconds to solve, the aggregate amount of time translates into hundreds of thousands of hours of human effort that can potentially be tapped. During the reCAPTCHA system's first year of operation, more than 1.2 billion reCAPTCHAs have been solved and more than 440 million words have been deciphered. That's the equivalent of manually transcribing more than 17,600 books.
"More Web sites are adopting reCAPTCHAs each day, so the rate of transcription keeps growing," said von Ahn, an assistant professor in the School of Computer Science's Computer Science Department. "More than 4 million words are being transcribed every day. It would take more than 1,500 people working 40 hours a week at a rate of 60 words a minute to match our weekly output."
Von Ahn said reCAPTCHAs are being used to digitize books for the Internet Archive and to digitize newspapers for The New York Times. Digitization allows older works to be indexed, searched, reformatted and stored in the same way as today's online texts.
Old texts are typically digitized by photographically scanning pages and then transforming the text using optical character recognition (OCR) software. But when ink has faded and paper has yellowed, OCR sometimes can't recognize some words — as many as one out of every five, according to the Carnegie Mellon team's tests. Without reCAPTCHA, these words must be deciphered manually at great expense.
Conventional CAPTCHAs, which were developed at Carnegie Mellon, involve letters and numbers whose shapes have been distorted or backgrounds altered so that computers can't recognize them, but humans can. To create reCAPTCHAs, the researchers use images of words from old texts that OCR systems have had trouble reading.
Helping to make old books and newspapers more accessible to a computerized world is something that the researchers find rewarding, but is only part of a larger goal. "We are demonstrating that we can take human effort — human processing power — that would otherwise be wasted and redirect it to accomplish tasks that computers cannot yet solve," von Ahn said.
For instance, he and his students have developed online games, available at http://www.gwap.com , that analyze photos and audio recordings — tasks beyond the capability of computers. Similarly, University of Washington biologists recently built Fold It, http://fold.it/ , a game in which people compete to determine the ideal structure of a given protein.
In addition to von Ahn, authors of the new report include computer science undergraduate Benjamin Maurer, graduate students Colin McMillen and David Abraham, and Manuel Blum, professor of computer science.
Source: Carnegie Mellon University
-
Scientists striving to put a human face on the robot generation
Nov 30, 2011 |
4 / 5 (1) |
1
-
Word association: Study matches brain scans with complex thought
Aug 31, 2011 |
4.6 / 5 (7) |
5
-
Don't (always) talk to your neighbor
Jul 11, 2011 |
3.2 / 5 (10) |
1
-
Of minds and machines
May 10, 2011 |
3 / 5 (1) |
0
-
Robot engages novice computer scientists (w/ video)
May 05, 2011 |
3.5 / 5 (2) |
2
-
Engineers build first sub-10-nm carbon nanotube transistor
Feb 01, 2012 |
4.9 / 5 (31) |
30
-
Something old, something new: Evolution and the structural divergence of duplicate genes
Jan 31, 2012 |
4.6 / 5 (7) |
1
-
The hidden nanoworld of ice crystals: Revealing the dynamic behavior of quasi-liquid layers
Jan 30, 2012 |
5 / 5 (3) |
1
-
Stock market network reveals investor clustering
Jan 27, 2012 |
3.9 / 5 (23) |
8
-
Of microchemistry and molecules: Electronic microfluidic device synthesizes biocompatible probes
Jan 26, 2012 |
5 / 5 (1) |
0
-
Synergistic relations between computer science and technology.
Feb 06, 2012
-
how do iphone gloves work?
Feb 05, 2012
-
iPhone battery over time
Jan 30, 2012
-
Best alternate Tablet to an iPad for writing math or physics equations?
Jan 26, 2012
-
Sending SMS to a website
Jan 20, 2012
-
Need help with my technical fest!
Jan 19, 2012
- More from Physics Forums - Computing & Technology
More news stories
New error-correcting codes guarantee the fastest possible rate of data transmission
Error-correcting codes are one of the triumphs of the digital age. Theyre a way of encoding information so that it can be transmitted across a communication channel such as an optical fiber o ...
Technology / Computer Sciences
8 hours ago |
5 / 5 (3) |
4
|
Small modular reactor design could be a 'SUPERSTAR'
(PhysOrg.com) -- Though most of today's nuclear reactors are cooled by water, we've long known that there are alternatives; in fact, the world's first nuclear-powered electricity in 1951 came from a reactor ...
Technology / Energy & Green Tech
7 hours ago |
4.2 / 5 (10) |
17
|
Advanced power-grid model finds low-cost, low-carbon future in West
(PhysOrg.com) -- The least expensive way for the Western U.S. to reduce greenhouse gas emissions enough to help prevent the worst consequences of global warming is to replace coal with renewable and other ...
Technology / Energy & Green Tech
7 hours ago |
5 / 5 (2) |
7
|
New power source discovered
(PhysOrg.com) -- Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and RMIT University have made a breakthrough in energy storage and power generation.
Technology / Energy & Green Tech
7 hours ago |
5 / 5 (7) |
3
|
Netflix light on flicks as viewers soak up TV shows
Like most fresh faces that arrive in Hollywood, Netflix wanted to be a movie star. But now it's learning what many in Tinseltown have known for decades: Movies are sexy, but the real money is in television.
5 hours ago |
not rated yet |
1
Complex wiring of the nervous system may rely on a just a handful of genes and proteins
Researchers at the Salk Institute have discovered a startling feature of early brain development that helps to explain how complex neuron wiring patterns are programmed using just a handful of critical genes. ...
Human cognitive performance suffers following natural disasters, researchers find
Not surprisingly, victims of a natural disaster can experience stress and anxiety, but a new study indicates that it might also cause them to make more errors - some serious - in their daily lives. In their upcoming Human Fa ...
The power of estrogen -- male snakes attract other males
A new study has shown that boosting the estrogen levels of male garter snakes causes them to secrete the same pheromones that females use to attract suitors, and turned the males into just about the sexiest ...
Both maternal and paternal age linked to autism
Older maternal and paternal age are jointly associated with having a child with autism, according to a recently published study led by researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).
Putting the squeeze on planets outside our solar system
(PhysOrg.com) -- Using high-powered lasers, scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and collaborators discovered that molten magnesium silicate undergoes a phase change in the liquid state, abruptly ...
Curry spice component may help slow prostate tumor growth
Curcumin, an active component of the Indian curry spice turmeric, may help slow down tumor growth in castration-resistant prostate cancer patients on androgen deprivation therapy (ADT), a study from researchers ...
Aug 14, 2008
Rank: 4.5 / 5 (2)
Aug 15, 2008
Rank: 4.3 / 5 (3)
Given that the point of presenting the "reCaptcha" is that we don't know its content, how, when the human is filling in the web form, do we know that they've entered the correct data? If we don't, then it isn't much of a validation process (how would they differentiate between humans and 'bots?) and if we do, then that implies someone else has already spent their time decoding the knackered text so that we can do a fair comparison.
Anyone fill in the gaps?
Aug 15, 2008
Rank: 5 / 5 (4)
"
But if a computer can't read such a CAPTCHA, how does the system know the correct answer to the puzzle? Here's how: Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known. The user is then asked to read both words. If they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one. The system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct."
Aug 15, 2008
Rank: not rated yet