Advancing Post-OCR Correction: A Comparative Study of Synthetic Data

Shuhao Guan, Derek Greene


Abstract
This paper explores the application of synthetic data in the post-OCR domain on multiple fronts by conducting experiments to assess the impact of data volume, augmentation, and synthetic data generation methods on model performance. Furthermore, we introduce a novel algorithm that leverages computer vision feature detection algorithms to calculate glyph similarity for constructing post-OCR synthetic data. Through experiments conducted across a variety of languages, including several low-resource ones, we demonstrate that models like ByT5 can significantly reduce Character Error Rates (CER) without the need for manually annotated data, and our proposed synthetic data generation method shows advantages over traditional methods, particularly in low-resource languages.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-acl.361
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6036–6047
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-acl.361
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Shuhao Guan and Derek Greene. 2024. Advancing Post-OCR Correction: A Comparative Study of Synthetic Data. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics ACL 2024, pages 6036–6047, Bangkok, Thailand and virtual meeting. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Advancing Post-OCR Correction: A Comparative Study of Synthetic Data (Guan & Greene, Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/nschneid-patch-4/2024.findings-acl.361.pdf