A4 Refereed article in a conference publication
OCR Error Post-Correction with LLMs in Historical Documents: No Free Lunches
Authors: Kanerva, Jenna; Ledins, Cassadra; Käpyaho, Siiri; Ginter, Filip
Editors: Holdt, Špela Arhar; Ilinykh, Nikolai; Scalvini, Barbara; Bruton, Micaella; Debess, Iben Nyholm; Tudor, Crina Madalina
Conference name: Resources and Representations for Under-Resourced Languages and Domains
Publisher: University of Tartu Library, Estonia
Publication year: 2025
Book title : Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Resources and Representations for Under-Resourced Languages and Domains (RESOURCEFUL-2025)
First page : 38
Last page: 47
ISBN: 978-9908-53-121-2
Publication's open availability at the time of reporting: Open Access
Publication channel's open availability : Open Access publication channel
Web address : https://aclanthology.org/2025.resourceful-1.8/
Self-archived copy’s web address: https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/506501669
Optical Character Recognition (OCR) systems often introduce errors when transcribing historical documents, leaving room for post-correction to improve text quality. This study evaluates the use of open-weight LLMs for OCR error correction in historical English and Finnish datasets. We explore various strategies, including parameter optimization, quantization, segment length effects, and text continuation methods. Our results demonstrate that while modern LLMs show promise in reducing character error rates (CER) in English, a practically useful performance for Finnish was not reached. Our findings highlight the potential and limitations of LLMs in scaling OCR post-correction for large historical corpora.
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Funding information in the publication:
This work was carried out in the Human Diversity University profilation programme (PROFI-7) of the Research Council of Finland, as well as in the context of several other research projects supported by the Research Council of Finland.
