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A Benchmark and Dataset for Post-OCR text correction in Sanskrit

Ayush Maheshwari, Nikhil Singh, Amrith Krishna, Ganesh Ramakrishnan


Abstract
Sanskrit is a classical language with about 30 million extant manuscripts fit for digitisation, available in written, printed or scanned-image forms. However, it is still considered to be a low-resource language when it comes to available digital resources. In this work, we release a post-OCR text correction dataset containing around 218,000 sentences, with 1.5 million words, from 30 different books. Texts in Sanskrit are known to be diverse in terms of their linguistic and stylistic usage since Sanskrit was the ‘lingua francua’ for discourse in the Indian subcontinent for about 3 millennia. Keeping this in mind, we release a multi-domain dataset, from areas as diverse as astronomy, medicine and mathematics, with some of them as old as 18 centuries. Further, we release multiple strong baselines as benchmarks for the task, based on pre-trained Seq2Seq language models. We find that our best-performing model, consisting of byte level tokenization in conjunction with phonetic encoding (Byt5+SLP1), yields a 23% point increase over the OCR output in terms of word and character error rates. Moreover, we perform extensive experiments in evaluating these models on their performance and analyse common causes of mispredictions both at the graphemic and lexical levels. Our code and dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/ayushbits/pe-ocr-sanskrit.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-emnlp.466
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6258–6265
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.466
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.466
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Ayush Maheshwari, Nikhil Singh, Amrith Krishna, and Ganesh Ramakrishnan. 2022. A Benchmark and Dataset for Post-OCR text correction in Sanskrit. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 6258–6265, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Benchmark and Dataset for Post-OCR text correction in Sanskrit (Maheshwari et al., Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.466.pdf