# Modernizing Historical Documents: a User Study

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.00659 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.00659/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [From Plenipotentiary to Puddingless: Users and Uses of New Words in Early English Letters](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.09926/) (2021)
- [Two Demonstrations of the Machine Translation Applications to Historical Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01417/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accessibility to historical documents is mostly limited to scholars. This is due to the language barrier inherent in human language and the linguistic properties of these documents. Given a historical document, modernization aims to generate a new version of it, written in the modern version of the document's language. Its goal is to tackle the language barrier, decreasing the comprehension difficulty and making historical documents accessible to a broader audience. In this work, we proposed a new neural machine translation approach that profits from modern documents to enrich its systems. We tested this approach with both automatic and human evaluation, and conducted a user study. Results showed that modernization is successfully reaching its goal, although it still has room for improvement.