Information Retrieval from the Digitized Books

TL;DR

This paper presents an OCR-based search engine for digitized books, improving information retrieval from large document collections, especially for Indic scripts, using NLP techniques and dataset analysis.

Contribution

Development of an OCR search engine for enhanced information retrieval from digitized books, addressing challenges with Indic scripts and integrating NLP methods.

Findings

Improved retrieval accuracy for Indic scripts.

Analysis of dataset from NDLI.

Proposed methods for future research in IRE.

Abstract

Extracting the relevant information out of a large number of documents is a challenging and tedious task. The quality of results generated by the traditionally available full-text search engine and text-based image retrieval systems is not optimal. Information retrieval (IR) tasks become more challenging with the nontraditional language scripts, as in the case of Indic scripts. The authors have developed OCR (Optical Character Recognition) Search Engine to make an Information Retrieval & Extraction (IRE) system that replicates the current state-of-the-art methods using the IRE and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. Here we have presented the study of the methods used for performing search and retrieval tasks. The details of this system, along with the statistics of the dataset (source: National Digital Library of India or NDLI), is also presented. Additionally, the ideas to further explore and add value to research in IRE are also discussed.