SARCLIP: A Scalable CLIP-Based Retrieval System for Seventeenth-Century Spanish American Notary Records

2026-08-22

AI Summary

为解决历史手稿因书写不一致、古文正字法及缺乏可靠转录而难以搜索的问题，SARCLIP利用基于CLIP的模型和近似最近邻检索等技术提供了一个可扩展的检索系统。

Abstract

Historical manuscript archives resist standard text search due to inconsistent handwriting, archaic orthography, and the absence of reliable transcriptions at scale. We present SARCLIP (Spanish American Notary Records Meets CLIP), a deployed retrieval system for the National Archives of Argentina's seventeenth-century Spanish American notary records, a corpus of more than 13.6 million word-image patches spanning over 100 microfilm rolls ("rollos"). SARCLIP is built on a CLIP ViT-B/16 model contrastively fine-tuned on paleography-expert-annotated data, and extends prior work by (1) scaling approximate nearest-neighbor retrieval to the near-complete corpus via a FAISS index, (2) refining top-k results through pseudo-relevance feedback (Rocchio), and (3) closing a human-in-the-loop cycle through visual document browsing, canvas-based patch annotation, and periodic model retraining. Unlike the system's initial research prototype, which evaluated retrieval on a small five-rollo subset, SARCLIP is demonstrated as a complete, interactive tool operating over the near-complete corpus. Attendees experience the full search, browse, annotate, and retrain workflow live during this demonstration.

Problem

• Historical Manuscripts
• Text Search
• Seventeenth-Century Spanish American Notary Records
• Inconsistent Handwriting
• Archaic Orthography

Innovation

• CLIP
• Approximate Nearest-Neighbor Retrieval
• Pseudo-Relevance Feedback
• Human-in-the-Loop