Using Generative Artificial Intelligence to Automate Gravestone Documentation and Analysis
Date:
Online cemetery digitization systems are limited by the need for manual information extraction from gravestone photography and content-area expertise in creating informative analyses. These limitations force existing systems to offer search-and-retrieve interfaces with limited context about the burial culture or history of smaller or less prominent cemeteries. Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can enhance such systems with automated information extraction, AI-composed analyses and summaries, and interactive conversational interfaces to explore burial culture. We describe the implementation of a multi-lingual information extraction pipeline that combines optical character recognition (OCR) libraries and Vision-Language Models (VLM) and evaluate its effectiveness on a set of gravestones with a variety of scripts, including multi-script gravestones: Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic. A companion article presents additional features implemented, including automatically generated cemetery summaries and a database-grounded conversational interface.
You can see the slides here