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Publication Date

2023-5

First Advisor

Nicholas R. Howe

Document Type

Honors Project

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Computer Science

Keywords

handwriting identification, self-supervised learning, handwriting style analysis, ancient Syriac document identification, contrastive representation learning

Abstract

This thesis presents a series of methods of representation learning for ancient Syriac manuscripts style identification. Our research started with grapheme-based method that reduces the dimension of the images with a codebook trained by k-means clustering and then moved to traditional supervised learning with fine-tuning the pre-trained VGG model. We then explored with contrastive representation learning framework with our dataset and found its applicability in handwriting-based images. Furthermore, we proposed a new self-supervised style content separation model that extracts the style information and uses them to classify the manuscripts. Our model performs well in the document identification task and shows strong potential in manuscript dating. Our work provides insight into utilizing self-supervised learning to find a representation space where manuscripts sharing similar styles would cluster while those in different styles would be away from each other.

Rights

©2023 Yanning Tan. Access limited to the Smith College community and other researchers while on campus. Smith College community members also may access from off-campus using a Smith College log-in. Other off-campus researchers may request a copy through Interlibrary Loan for personal use.

Language

English

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