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
Aug 20

Evaluating Structured Information Extraction with Open Models in a High Risk Public Sector Application

The paper evaluates open-source OCR, LLM, and VLM systems on a high‑risk public sector task: extracting structured data from student application documents. Results show that VLMs generally outperform OCR+LLM pipelines, yet only 4 of 35 configurations achieve F1 scores above 0.5, with most combinations scoring below 0.25. Model size and input quality, especially preserving OCR structure, are critical factors influencing performance.

By Elias Schubert, Felix Bie{\ss}mann
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 13

Multilingual OCR-Aware Fine-Tuning and Prompt-Guided Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2605. 16409v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Optical character recognition (OCR) and multilingual scene-text understanding remain challenging for multimodal large language models (MLLMs), particularly in real-world images containing small or degraded text, cluttered layouts, occlusion, handwriting, and complex typography.

By Qinwu Xu, Yifan Jiang, Haoyu Ren
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