@inproceedings{bryan-etal-2023-efficientocr,
title = "{E}fficient{OCR}: An Extensible, Open-Source Package for Efficiently Digitizing World Knowledge",
author = "Bryan, Tom and
Carlson, Jacob and
Arora, Abhishek and
Dell, Melissa",
editor = "Feng, Yansong and
Lefever, Els",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations",
month = dec,
year = "2023",
address = "Singapore",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-demo.52",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-demo.52",
pages = "579--596",
abstract = "Billions of public domain documents remain trapped in hard copy or lack an accurate digitization. Modern natural language processing methods cannot be used to index, retrieve, and summarize their texts; conduct computational textual analyses; or extract information for statistical analyses, and these texts cannot be incorporated into language model training. Given the diversity and sheer quantity of public domain texts, liberating them at scale requires optical character recognition (OCR) that is accurate, extremely cheap to deploy, and sample-efficient to customize to novel collections, languages, and character sets. Existing OCR engines, largely designed for small-scale commercial applications in high resource languages, often fall short of these requirements. EffOCR (EfficientOCR), a novel open-source OCR package, meets both the computational and sample efficiency requirements for liberating texts at scale by abandoning the sequence-to-sequence architecture typically used for OCR, which takes representations from a learned vision model as inputs to a learned language model. Instead, EffOCR models OCR as a character or word-level image retrieval problem. EffOCR is cheap and sample efficient to train, as the model only needs to learn characters{'} visual appearance and not how they are used in sequence to form language. Models in the EffOCR model zoo can be deployed off-the-shelf with only a few lines of code and include lightweight models designed for mobile phones that are extremely cheap to deploy. Importantly, EffOCR also allows for easy, sample efficient customization with a simple model training interface and minimal labeling requirements due to its sample efficiency. We illustrate the utility of EffOCR by cheaply and accurately digitizing 20 million historical U.S. newspaper scans, evaluating zero-shot performance on randomly selected documents from the U.S. National Archives, and accurately digitizing a Japanese document collection for which all other OCR solutions failed.",
}
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<abstract>Billions of public domain documents remain trapped in hard copy or lack an accurate digitization. Modern natural language processing methods cannot be used to index, retrieve, and summarize their texts; conduct computational textual analyses; or extract information for statistical analyses, and these texts cannot be incorporated into language model training. Given the diversity and sheer quantity of public domain texts, liberating them at scale requires optical character recognition (OCR) that is accurate, extremely cheap to deploy, and sample-efficient to customize to novel collections, languages, and character sets. Existing OCR engines, largely designed for small-scale commercial applications in high resource languages, often fall short of these requirements. EffOCR (EfficientOCR), a novel open-source OCR package, meets both the computational and sample efficiency requirements for liberating texts at scale by abandoning the sequence-to-sequence architecture typically used for OCR, which takes representations from a learned vision model as inputs to a learned language model. Instead, EffOCR models OCR as a character or word-level image retrieval problem. EffOCR is cheap and sample efficient to train, as the model only needs to learn characters’ visual appearance and not how they are used in sequence to form language. Models in the EffOCR model zoo can be deployed off-the-shelf with only a few lines of code and include lightweight models designed for mobile phones that are extremely cheap to deploy. Importantly, EffOCR also allows for easy, sample efficient customization with a simple model training interface and minimal labeling requirements due to its sample efficiency. We illustrate the utility of EffOCR by cheaply and accurately digitizing 20 million historical U.S. newspaper scans, evaluating zero-shot performance on randomly selected documents from the U.S. National Archives, and accurately digitizing a Japanese document collection for which all other OCR solutions failed.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T EfficientOCR: An Extensible, Open-Source Package for Efficiently Digitizing World Knowledge
%A Bryan, Tom
%A Carlson, Jacob
%A Arora, Abhishek
%A Dell, Melissa
%Y Feng, Yansong
%Y Lefever, Els
%S Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations
%D 2023
%8 December
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Singapore
%F bryan-etal-2023-efficientocr
%X Billions of public domain documents remain trapped in hard copy or lack an accurate digitization. Modern natural language processing methods cannot be used to index, retrieve, and summarize their texts; conduct computational textual analyses; or extract information for statistical analyses, and these texts cannot be incorporated into language model training. Given the diversity and sheer quantity of public domain texts, liberating them at scale requires optical character recognition (OCR) that is accurate, extremely cheap to deploy, and sample-efficient to customize to novel collections, languages, and character sets. Existing OCR engines, largely designed for small-scale commercial applications in high resource languages, often fall short of these requirements. EffOCR (EfficientOCR), a novel open-source OCR package, meets both the computational and sample efficiency requirements for liberating texts at scale by abandoning the sequence-to-sequence architecture typically used for OCR, which takes representations from a learned vision model as inputs to a learned language model. Instead, EffOCR models OCR as a character or word-level image retrieval problem. EffOCR is cheap and sample efficient to train, as the model only needs to learn characters’ visual appearance and not how they are used in sequence to form language. Models in the EffOCR model zoo can be deployed off-the-shelf with only a few lines of code and include lightweight models designed for mobile phones that are extremely cheap to deploy. Importantly, EffOCR also allows for easy, sample efficient customization with a simple model training interface and minimal labeling requirements due to its sample efficiency. We illustrate the utility of EffOCR by cheaply and accurately digitizing 20 million historical U.S. newspaper scans, evaluating zero-shot performance on randomly selected documents from the U.S. National Archives, and accurately digitizing a Japanese document collection for which all other OCR solutions failed.
%R 10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-demo.52
%U https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-demo.52
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-demo.52
%P 579-596
Markdown (Informal)
[EfficientOCR: An Extensible, Open-Source Package for Efficiently Digitizing World Knowledge](https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-demo.52) (Bryan et al., EMNLP 2023)
ACL