Speaker
Description
Handwritten text recognition (HTR) is usually judged by how faithfully it reproduces what stands on the page. Czech editorial practice asks for something else. Old Czech orthography leaves consonants and vowel quantity underdetermined, so a single written form regularly supports several grammatically sound readings. Vowel quantity in Czech carries grammar, not just sound. An edition or a linguistic corpus is expected to resolve that: to commit to one reading and to say so. HTR output reproduces whichever convention its ground truth encoded, without registering that a convention was applied at all. The result is a gap that accuracy figures do not measure: a model can score well and still produce text that no Czech editorial tradition would accept.
This talk asks how far that gap can be closed, and at what cost. The models currently available for Old Czech are diplomatic almost without exception, which leaves two routes: train on interpretative ground truth and accept that the interpretation becomes invisible inside the model, or keep the output diplomatic and rebuild the editorial layer afterwards, where the decisions stay explicit and reviewable. Neither is free. I set out what each route makes visible and what it hides, and argue that the question editors should be asking is not how accurate a model is, but which decisions it has already made on their behalf.