Huge amounts of digital page images of important manuscripts are preserved in
archives worldwide. The amounts are so large that it is generally unfeasible
for archivists to adequately tag most of the documents with the required
metadata so as to low proper organization of the archives and effective
exploration by scholars and the general public. The class or ``typology'' of a
document is perhaps the most important tag to be included in the metadata. The
technical problem is one of automatic classification of documents, each
consisting of a set of untranscribed handwritten text images, by the textual
contents of the images. The approach considered is based on ``probabilistic
indexing'', a relatively novel technology which allows to effectively represent
the intrinsic word-level uncertainty exhibited by handwritten text images. We
assess the performance of this approach on a large collection of complex
notarial manuscripts from the Spanish Archivo Hostórico Provincial de
Cádiz, with promising results.

本篇论文探讨了利用概率索引技术，对手写文本图像集合进行自动分类的问题，解决大量历史手稿数据的标签化和有效探索问题，并以西班牙 Hostórico 省的复杂公证手稿为例，取得了有希望的成果。