arXiv Computation and Language

MUDIDI: A Two-Stage Framework for Multilingual Dictionary Digitization with Language Models

MUDIDI is a two-stage framework designed to digitize multilingual dictionaries that are currently only available as scanned images. The first stage assesses character recognition and markup preservation, while the second stage segments dictionary entries and maps them into the SIL Multi-Dictionary Formatter schema. The authors also release a dataset of 30 annotated dictionaries and benchmark OCR, LLM, and VLM systems, finding that LLMs generally outperform others and that providing additional context improves digitization quality.

arXiv AI
Jul 7

When Simpler Is Better: Evaluating Translation Pipelines for Medieval Latin Manuscripts

arXiv:2607. 03836v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Despite remarkable progress in machine translation, Vision Language Models (VLMs) struggle on historical manuscripts, a domain that stresses core Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities: low-resource transliteration, archaic vocabulary, and noisy input signals.

By Nguyen Kim Hai Bui, Md. Easin Arafat, Tam\'as G\'abor Orosz, Mufti Mahmud
arXiv AI
Oct 9

From Pixels to Structure: Lightweight Vision-Language Models for Document OCR and Structured JSON Extraction

The paper evaluates eight open‑source lightweight Vision‑Language Models (up to 7 B parameters) for converting document images into structured JSON, focusing on heritage collections with historical handwriting and non‑standard layouts. It compares zero‑shot, few‑shot, and fine‑tuned settings, measuring performance with CER, ANLS*, and mAP‑F1, and examines the effects of hyperparameter tuning, image preprocessing, and multi‑stage training. The study demonstrates that adapted VLMs can serve as a sustainable, private alternative to commercial OCR systems for institutional archives.

By Uddipan Basu Bir, Vincent Christlein, Andreas Maier, Mathias Zinnen
arXiv AI
Jul 21

DocOCR-Eval: A Correction-Based Framework for OCR Tool Selection Without Ground Truth

arXiv:2607. 16203v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Document parsing is a foundational step for document understanding tasks such as visual question answering and key information extraction, as it transforms unstructured scanned images into structured representations by extracting textual, visual, and layout information.

By Zihan Xu, Puzhen Wu, Lawrence Chun Man Lau, Wei Liu, Sirui Li, Yifan Peng, Yihao Ding
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

Embedding Initialization for Unseen Low-resource Languages in Multilingual NMT: A Case Study on Limbum-English Translation

arXiv:2608. 07629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual neural machine translation models such as NLLB-200 cover 200 languages but leave thousands unsupported, including most Grassfields Bantu languages of Cameroon.

By Samiratu Ntohsi, Neza David Tuyishimire, Anesu Kafesu, Marvin Ogore, Samuel Oluwajunwonlo Babalola, Oche Ankeli
arXiv AI
Aug 12

TongGuOCR: A Layout-Aware and Token-Augmented OCR MLLM for Chinese Historical Documents

arXiv:2608. 07917v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Chinese historical documents preserve valuable cultural heritage, but many collections remain accessible only as scanned page images, preventing full-text retrieval, collation, and computational analysis.

By Zhongheng Zhou, Yi Sun, Huiguo He, Yuyi Zhang, Peirong Zhang, Yulin Fang, Dezhi Peng, Minghui Liao, Lianwen Jin
arXiv AI
Aug 11

TongGuOCR: A Layout-Aware and Token-Augmented OCR Framework for Chinese Historical Documents

arXiv:2608. 07917v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Chinese historical documents preserve valuable cultural heritage, but many collections remain accessible only as scanned page images, preventing full-text retrieval, collation, and computational analysis.

By Zhongheng Zhou, Yi Sun, Huiguo He, Yuyi Zhang, Peirong Zhang, Yulin Fang, Dezhi Peng, Minghui Liao, Lianwen Jin
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 19

Impact of Iterative Fine-Tuning on Transcription Accuracy in Complex Historical Sanskrit Manuscripts

The paper presents a local traditional OCR pipeline that can be iteratively fine‑tuned on both layout and appearance levels of complex historical Sanskrit manuscripts. By adapting to the specific manuscript distribution, the pipeline improves transcription accuracy across subsequent pages, reducing the need for costly human annotation. The authors apply the method to three manuscripts, release a dataset with detailed layout and Unicode annotations in PAGE‑XML format, and benchmark the results against leading multimodal large language models.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

Impact of Iterative Fine-Tuning on Transcription Accuracy in Complex Historical Sanskrit Manuscripts

The paper presents a local traditional OCR pipeline that can be iteratively fine‑tuned on both layout and appearance levels of complex historical Sanskrit manuscripts. By adapting to the specific manuscript distribution, the pipeline reduces human annotation effort and improves transcription accuracy across subsequent pages. The authors apply this method to three manuscripts, release a dataset with detailed layout and Unicode annotations in PAGE‑XML format, and benchmark the pipeline against leading multimodal large language models.

By Kartik Chincholikar, Kaushik Gopalan, Mihir Hasabnis