Papers › OCR Post Correction for Endangered Language Texts

OCR Post Correction for Endangered Language Texts

10 Nov 2020EMNLP 2020 11arXiv:2011.05402archive 2025-07-28

Shruti Rijhwani, Antonios Anastasopoulos, Graham Neubig

There is little to no data available to build natural language processing models for most endangered languages. However, textual data in these languages often exists in formats that are not machine-readable, such as paper books and scanned images. In this work, we address the task of extracting text from these resources. We create a benchmark dataset of transcriptions for scanned books in three critically endangered languages and present a systematic analysis of how general-purpose OCR tools are not robust to the data-scarce setting of endangered languages. We develop an OCR post-correction method tailored to ease training in this data-scarce setting, reducing the recognition error rate by 34% on average across the three languages.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

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.

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