[Taxacom] Automatized taxonomic recognition in PaleoDeepDive

[David Campbell]

My impression from working largely with older texts, rather less than
optimal for OCR, and based on what I notice rather than statistics (and
thus biased towards noting anomalies) is that BHL's automated taxonomic
name finder has quite high rates of both missing names and spurious hits
(both mistaking non-taxonomic items for homonymous or near homonymous names
and incorrect OCR).  The article sounds like the newer method also does
poorly on these problems.  Similar issues apply to Google's OCR efforts.

Perhaps a more fundamental problem is that, even with improved OCR and
rules for parsing text, the computer doesn't know how to tell good data
from bad (perhaps merely in need of an update, or perhaps poor quality, but
equally capable of giving spurious results in a meta analysis).

What if database efforts actually hired taxonomically competent
individuals, instead of assuming that more data will sort itself out?


On Fri, Jul 3, 2015 at 2:59 AM, Robert Huber <rhuber at uni-bremen.de> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> Someone just sent me a link to this interesting article in PLOS which
> mentions another methodology to extract taxonomic names from full text to
> do some nice statistics etc.
>
> http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0113523
>
> I wonder how this compares with BHL tools and would be very interested to
> hear your opinion on that in general.
>
> thank you,
> Robert
>
> --
> Dr. Robert Huber,
>
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-- 
Dr. David Campbell
Assistant Professor, Geology
Department of Natural Sciences
Box 7270
Gardner-Webb University
Boiling Springs NC 28017