arXiv:2608.22366v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Vision-language models (VLMs) are increasingly being used for document understanding, yet their role in Arabic and Islamic manuscript recognition remai...
RefLAM is a pipeline that converts manuscript page images and clean transcriptions into validated, line-level ground truth for Arabic handwritten text recognition. It combines a deep‑learning page‑segmentation model, a multimodal large language model for structured OCR, and a diacritic‑agnostic fuzzy alignment engine that assigns a confidence score to each line, with a provable correctness guarantee for perfect scores. Using RefLAM, the authors achieved a 75× speedup over manual annotation and released AraMS‑28k, a dataset of 14 historical Arabic manuscripts with detailed annotations.
AraMS-28k is the largest publicly released line‑level dataset of genuine historical Arabic manuscripts, containing 14 books, 3,043 pages, and 28,600 annotated text lines (27,971 main‑text and 629 margin). The dataset spans three script traditions—Naskh, Ruq'ah, and Maghrebi—and includes a lithographed printed edition for format diversity. Each line is labeled as main‑text or margin, with margin lines that have a clear attachment point annotated with an insertion anchor to recover the manuscript’s true non‑linear reading order; both fully vocalized and diacritic‑normalized transcriptions are provided, and the data was produced via the RefLAM pipeline combining OCR, clean transcriptions, and human review. "whyItMatters":"The dataset’s comprehensive line‑level annotations, including reading‑order anchors and dual transcription formats, enable reproducible research on Arabic manuscript recognition, layout analysis, and reading‑order recovery under a CC BY‑NC‑SA 4.0 license."
arXiv:2608. 19385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Historical Arabic manuscript transcription is not only a recognition problem.
The paper evaluates a multilingual ASR model (MMS‑1B‑all) on a Garrusi Kurdish dataset using a common‑reference staged normalization approach. By normalizing both reference and hypothesis, the authors show that raw Arabic‑script hypotheses yield a 111.70 % WER, which drops to 97.85 % after folding into a reduced orthography, highlighting the impact of orthographic differences on error measurement. A Southern Kurdish fine‑tuned system performs worse, and residual errors are partly due to scoring‑pipeline limitations rather than recognition failures.
arXiv:2608.03617v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The personal archive of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935) is held as fond 555 of the Archive of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The archive...
The paper presents a human‑annotated dataset of 100 Quran recitation recordings, identifying 348 scored units and 162 localized events across ten combined labels. An evaluator that scores both labels and word positions achieves a label‑aware F1 of 0.525 and a localization F1 of 0.826, with adapted production cleaner/alignment components yielding similar scores. A pilot experiment with eight 20‑minute runs across three coders and eight models shows wide variance in F1 (0.143–0.892) and highlights that most gold events are detected, leaving only span extent and label conventions as the remaining challenges.
arXiv:2609.14967v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quranic text is distributed in two orthographic forms that are byte-level distinct: the Uthmani script used in every printed mushaf, and the Standard (...
The paper explores how synthetic data can be used to train a Thai OCR model without real OCR labels. By systematically varying factors such as typeface diversity, page structure, and handwriting glyphs, the authors identify which aspects of realism most improve transfer to real documents. Using these insights, they adapt a large PaddleOCR model into Wayu‑Paxa‑OCR‑Zero, achieving a median character error rate of 1.24% on printed pages and 20.55% on handwriting, outperforming existing Thai OCR systems.
arXiv:2609.37755v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Purpose: Most Greek papyri remain unpublished and undigitised; a handwritten text recognition (HTR) pipeline that transcribes them automatically would...
arXiv:2609.16859v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: To train handwritten text recognition systems we need word images and their corresponding transcriptions, and these transcriptions are produced manua...
To train handwritten text recognition systems we need word images and their corresponding transcriptions, and these transcriptions are produced manually. For a script that can be read by only a small...