🖤 Probably one of my favorite projects that I've worked on so far, introducing Новояз (Novoyaz).
🛠 One of the first acts of the Bolshevik government after the Russian Revolution was the reform and standardization of the Russian language, which at the time had a non-standard and challenging orthography.
📚 Upon its reform the government launched a nationwide campaign called Ликбез (Likbez), which sought to improve literacy in the country (by the way, it worked, bringing the national literacy rate from <20% in the 1920s to >80% by the 1930s).
‼ While this is a remarkable result that should absolutely be celebrated, it's one that has left behind literally hundreds of thousands if not millions of artifacts using pre-reform Russian orthography.
😓 Researchers and historians are working tirelessly to translate these artifacts to modern Russian so that they may be archived and studied but many have told me that. they are doing this BY HAND (!).
💡 I thought, well this is a perfect use case for OCR and a fine-tuned LLM to step in and help to aid in this important work!