Skip to Content

Hennessy - LVMH

Letters of Richard Hennessy

France ✧ 2023-2026

Corpus


Handwritten letters from Richard Hennessy 
Copy registers of letters 
Expedition logs

About 20 000 images

Artificial intelligence technologies used


  • Automatic transcription and information extraction (recipient, date, place of writing).
  • Table analysis.
TEKLIA - Hennessy
TEKLIA - Hennessy

Objectives


Studying and sharing the correspondence of the brand's founder, Richard Hennessy (1776-1799).



Processing workflow


  • Training an HTR model
  • Page segmentation based on model prediction analysis
  • Matching with city repositories
  • Named entity recognition: extracting the people mentioned (recipients, others) along with their title/function
  • Creating a terms -> letters index and a letters -> terms index
  • Export: PDF files with text layer, Word files, CSV files
TEKLIA - Hennessy
TEKLIA - Hennessy
TEKLIA - Hennessy
TEKLIA - Hennessy

Article: 300 years of Richard Hennessy: AI to enhance skills

Article by Sivagami Casimir published on October 5, 2026 in Archimag

To better understand the life of Richard Hennessy, founder of the eponymous cognac house, the Heritage department of Jas Hennessy & Co delved into a complex corpus of 450 letters with the help of AI.

Read the article

-> Other press articles and publications

Hennessy: The historic Richonne site and the banks of the Charente River in Cognac.© Photo credit: JULIA HASSE for Hennessy