TEKLIA are very happy to announce that they have joined the BALSAC project, for which they will automate the handwriting recognition and information extraction.
The BALSAC project maintains and updates a database of digitized vital event records (birth, death and marriage certificates) from all over Quebec, from the first European settlements in the 17th century up to the present day.
These records are interconnected using a linkage method based on nominative information, which allows for the automatic recreation of genealogical relations and kinship structures in the Quebec population.
TEKLIA will handle the automated transcription, named entity recognition and extraction from over 6 million digitized parish register entries (birth/baptism and death records mainly), dating from 1850 to 1920.
About BALSAC
The BALSAC database is the joint property and responsibility of the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, Université Laval, McGill University and Université de Montréal. The project is managed by the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi; Hélène Vézina, a professor in the Department of Human and Social sciences at UQAC, is the current head of the project.
About TEKLIA
TEKLIA provides services and software for information extraction from digital and digitized documents. Using the most recent advances in Machine Learning and Deep Learning, TEKLIA is able to analyze and understand any document, historical or contemporary, and extract from it valuable information. TEKLIA is involved in a number of national and European research projects, and provides services to companies in various sectors (legal, financial, medical, IT).
<embed alt="BALSAC" embedtype="image" format="fullwidth" id="161"/> Image: Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec (BAnQ)