Truecasing


Truecasing, also called capitalization recovery, capitalization correction, or case restoration, is the problem in natural language processing of determining the proper capitalization of words where such information is unavailable. This commonly comes up due to the standard practice of automatically capitalizing the first word of a sentence. It can also arise in badly cased or noncased text.
Truecasing is unnecessary in languages whose scripts do not have a distinction between uppercase and lowercase letters. This includes all languages not written in the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic or Armenian alphabets, such as Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Thai, Hebrew, Arabic, Hindi, and Georgian.

Techniques

Applications

Truecasing aids in other NLP tasks, such as named entity recognition, automatic content extraction, and machine translation.
Proper capitalization allows easier detection of proper nouns, which are the starting points of NER and ACE. Some translation systems use statistical machine learning techniques, which could make use of the information contained in capitalization to increase accuracy.