Papers › Jochre 3 and the Yiddish OCR corpus

Jochre 3 and the Yiddish OCR corpus

14 Jan 2025arXiv:2501.08442archive 2025-07-28

Assaf Urieli, Amber Clooney, Michelle Sigiel, Grisha Leyfer

We describe the construction of a publicly available Yiddish OCR Corpus, and describe and evaluate the open source OCR tool suite Jochre 3, including an Alto editor for corpus annotation, OCR software for Alto OCR layer generation, and a customizable OCR search engine. The current version of the Yiddish OCR corpus contains 658 pages, 186K tokens and 840K glyphs. The Jochre 3 OCR tool uses various fine-tuned YOLOv8 models for top-down page layout analysis, and a custom CNN network for glyph recognition. It attains a CER of 1.5% on our test corpus, far out-performing all other existing public models for Yiddish. We analyzed the full 660M word Yiddish Book Center with Jochre 3 OCR, and the new OCR is searchable through the Yiddish Book Center OCR search engine.

PaperPDFCode

Code

gitlab.com/jochre/jochre3-ocr officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report
gitlab.com/jochre/jochre3-search officialmentioned in papermentioned on GitHub report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Tasks

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

YOLOv8

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections