Equal CER, Unequal Damage: Severity-Weighted Character Error Rate for OCR
Read the original on arXiv Computation and Language →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Computation and Language.
Character Error Rate (CER), the standard metric for OCR and vision-language models (VLMs), charges a typo as much as a wrong name. We introduce semCER, which keeps CER's alignment and denominator and...
arXiv:2605. 20712v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Automatic speech recognition replaces typing only when correction costs less than manual entry - a threshold determined by error types, not counts: fixing a misrecognized domain term costs far more than inserting a comma.
COMET reports translation quality as a single number, and that number is routinely compared across target languages written in different scripts. Such a comparison assumes Script Invariance: the score...
arXiv:2610.08159v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: COMET reports translation quality as a single number, and that number is routinely compared across target languages written in different scripts. Suc...
Vision‑Language Models (VLMs) are increasingly replacing traditional OCR for document understanding, but this study shows they often rewrite imperfect text into more plausible forms, a flaw that clean‑text OCR benchmarks miss. The authors created FaithC4, a multilingual perturbation benchmark of 1,455 single‑page documents with scramble, random substitution, and visually similar substitution attacks, and evaluated 15 systems across general‑purpose VLMs, OCR‑specialized VLMs, and traditional OCR pipelines. Results reveal that general‑purpose VLMs suffer up to 6.9 WER points under perturbation, OCR‑specialized VLMs 0.1–3.4 points, and traditional OCR less than 0.8 points on English; probing Qwen3‑VL‑4B shows rewriting occurs only when a perturbed word’s final‑layer representation remains close to the original, with short words (4–6 characters) rewritten up to 10% of the time. whyItMatters":"The findings highlight a critical limitation of VLMs in document transcription, underscoring the need for robust evaluation benchmarks that capture rewriting behavior beyond clean‑text accuracy."
arXiv:2607. 08143v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present the results of HIPE-OCRepair-2026, an ICDAR competition on LLM-assisted OCR post-correction of historical documents.