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Last time I checked a few months ago, LLMs were more accurate than the OCR that the archive is using. The web archive version is/was not using context to figure
by huijzer 2y ago
Last time I checked a few months ago, LLMs were more accurate than the OCR that the archive is using. The web archive version is/was not using context to figure out that for example “in the garden was a trge” should be “in the garden was a tree”. LLMs depending on the prompt do this.
- quuxplusone 2y agoPerhaps. My perhaps-curmudgeonly take on that is that it sounds a bit like "Xerox scanners/photocopiers randomly alter numbers in scanned documents" ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29223815 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29223815 ). I'd much rather deal with "In the garden was a trge" than "In the garden was a tree," for example, if what the page actually said was "In the garden was a tiger." That said, of course you're right that context is useful for OCRing. See for example https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/50249/why-does-ngram-show-an-extreme-spike-in-use-of-lol-in-mid-1600s https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/50249/why-does-n... Another, perhaps-leftpaddish argument is that by outsourcing the job to archive.org I'm allowing them to worry about the "best" way to OCR things, rather than spending my own time figuring it out. Wikisource, for example, seems to have gotten markedly better at OCRing pages over the past few years, and I assume that's because they're swapping out components behind the scenes.
- huijzer 2y agoFair enough. Very valid points. I guess it boils down to “test both systems and see what works best for the task at hand”. I can indeed imagine cases were your approach would be the better option for sure.