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Making Old Kurdish Publications Processable by Augmenting Available Optical Character Recognition Engines

Yaseen, Blnd, Hassani, Hossein

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Kurdish libraries have many historical publications that were printed back in the early days when printing devices were brought to Kurdistan. Having a good Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to help process these publications and contribute to the Kurdish languages resources which is crucial as Kurdish is considered a low-resource language. Current OCR systems are unable to extract text from historical documents as they have many issues, including being damaged, very fragile, having many marks left on them, and often written in non-standard fonts and more. This is a massive obstacle in processing these documents as currently processing them requires manual typing which is very time-consuming. In this study, we adopt an open-source OCR framework by Google, Tesseract version 5.0, that has been used to extract text for various languages. Currently, there is no public dataset, and we developed our own by collecting historical documents from Zheen Center for Documentation and Research, which were printed before 1950 and resulted in a dataset of 1233 images of lines with transcription of each. Then we used the Arabic model as our base model and trained the model using the dataset. We used different methods to evaluate our model, Tesseracts built-in evaluator lstmeval indicated a Character Error Rate (CER) of 0.755%. Additionally, Ocreval demonstrated an average character accuracy of 84.02%. Finally, we developed a web application to provide an easy- to-use interface for end-users, allowing them to interact with the model by inputting an image of a page and extracting the text. Having an extensive dataset is crucial to develop OCR systems with reasonable accuracy, as currently, no public datasets are available for historical Kurdish documents; this posed a significant challenge in our work. Additionally, the unaligned spaces between characters and words proved another challenge with our work.


Drone Attack Kills 3 Counterterrorist Fighters in Iraqi Kurdistan

NYT > Middle East

The elite forces were focused primarily on Islamic State fighters in recent years, but other Islamic militant groups now also move through Iraq's porous borders with Iran and Turkey. The Iraqi government announced early on Tuesday that the drone was launched by Turkey and called on Ankara to halt such attacks. "This aggression constitutes a violation of Iraq's sovereignty, security and territorial integrity," said Maj. Gen. Yahya Rasoul Abdullah, military spokesman for the prime minister, "These repeated attacks are not consistent with the principle of good neighborly relations between countries, and threaten to undermine Iraq's efforts to build good and balanced political, economic, and security relations with its neighbors." Kurdish leaders, whose territory is routinely targeted by Turkey, used angrier rhetoric. "This criminal act is an open trespassing of the border of the Kurdistan Region and of Iraq, and it is part of the conspiracy aimed at disturbing the peace and stability of the Kurdistan Region," said Bafel Talabani, president of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, one of the two main political parties in Kurdistan and the dominant one in Sulaymaniyah.