Subtitle: LLM-based Structured Data Extraction from the Rosenwald Guides: Methods and Hybrid Evaluation
📄 Read the final report (PDF) — covers the whole project
📝 Annotation framework preprint (arXiv) — covers the Double Triangle annotation methodology only
EPFL Semester Project — Ren Yi
Supervisors: Mikhaël Moreau, Dre Amélie Puche, Pr. Jérôme Baudry
This report presents methods for transforming scanned pages of the Rosenwald Guides — historical French medical directories (1887–1949) — into structured data. The work supports the MEDIF project, which studies the professional trajectories of early women physicians in France and French-speaking Switzerland.
The pilot corpus covers 20 editions (1887–1906), comprising 4,116 pages listing physicians and related professions.
| Chapter | File | Content |
|---|---|---|
| 1 — Introduction | 1-Introduction.tex |
Research motivation, challenges of historical OCR, and summary of contributions |
| 2 — Related Work | 2-related-work.tex |
Survey of traditional OCR, multimodal LLMs, hybrid OCR+LLM pipelines, and human-in-the-loop annotation |
| 3 — Dataset | 3-dataset.tex |
Description of the Rosenwald Guides, corpus construction, and layout challenges |
| 4 — Double Triangle Framework | 4-double-triangular.tex |
Proposed annotation methodology: two independent LLM systems + lightweight human review to create gold labels efficiently |
| 4.5 — Benchmark | 4.5-benchmark.tex |
Benchmark construction, model selection, image preprocessing ablation study, and quantitative results |
| 5 — Extraction Pipeline | 5-extraction-pipeline.tex |
Comparison of four extraction paradigms (OCR-only, MLLM image-only, MLLM image+OCR, text-only LLM on OCR output) and evaluation |
| 5.5 — Women Doctors | 5.5-women-doctors.tex |
Qualitative and quantitative analysis of extracted female doctor entries across the corpus |
| 6 — Conclusion | 6-Conclusion.tex |
Summary of findings, limitations, and directions for future work |
| Resource | Repository |
|---|---|
| Double Triangle Annotation Framework | https://github.com/nmrenyi/double-triangle-annotation |
| Extraction Pipeline | https://github.com/nmrenyi/extraire-tesseract-openai |
| Rosenwald Benchmark | https://github.com/nmrenyi/rosenwald-benchmark |
| Extraction Results | https://github.com/nmrenyi/rosenwald-extraction |
Requires a LaTeX distribution with latexmk and biber.
latexmk -pdf main.tex