arXiv Computation and Language

Which papyrus HTR is good enough? Character-error-rate tolerance of four papyrological tasks on Greek texts

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

RefLAM: A Reference-Grounded Line Annotation Pipeline for Historical Arabic Manuscripts

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.

By Mohamed Guechaoui, Mohamed Diaa Zellagui, Souleyman Chaib, Sahraoui Dhelim
arXiv Computer Vision
Sep 2

Can Scene Text Recognition Read Rare Compositions?

The paper reports that scene text recognition models, while achieving 89–97% accuracy on standard benchmarks, perform significantly worse on rare word–trigram combinations, with a 10–18 point drop in accuracy at the rare‑word/rare‑trigram corner across multiple languages and models. Scaling the vision backbone improves overall accuracy but does not alleviate this corner‑specific deficit. The authors identify the autoregressive decoder’s lexical prior as the root cause and show that architectural changes—specifically moving from autoregressive to CTC decoding—yield the largest improvement for these rare compositions.

By Genpei Zhang
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 12

JieZi: A Large-Scale Expert-Audited Dataset and Benchmark for Ancient Chinese Character Exegesis

The scholarly exegesis of ancient Chinese characters demands integrating visual observation, linguistic analysis, and historical context. However, existing computational approaches focus narrowly on subtasks such as character recognition and retrieval, lacking the structured datasets and benchmarks required for comprehensive scholarly analysis.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 15

An Empirical Analysis of Factual Errors in Human-Written Text and Its Application to Factual Error Detection

The paper presents an empirical study of factual errors in human-written text, focusing on corrections in newspaper articles to build a taxonomy of common mistakes such as kanji misconversions and unit errors. It evaluates large language models’ ability to detect these errors, finding that even advanced models like GPT‑5.4 achieve only a 52% word‑level F1 score on synthetic data, underscoring the difficulty of the task. The work highlights the gap in research on factual error detection in human writing compared to LLM hallucinations.

By Kazuma Iwamoto, Kazumasa Omura, Shotaro Ishihara