# Low-Resource Heuristics for Bahnaric Optical Character Recognition Improvement

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02965 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.02965/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [A Survey on Recent Approaches for Natural Language Processing in Low-Resource Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12309/) (2020)
- [OCR Post Correction for Endangered Language Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.05402/) (2020)
- [Neural OCR Post-Hoc Correction of Historical Corpora](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00583/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Bahnar, a minority language spoken across Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, faces significant preservation challenges due to limited research and data availability. This study addresses the critical need for accurate digitization of Bahnar language documents through optical character recognition (OCR) technology. Digitizing scanned paper documents poses significant challenges, as degraded image quality from broken or blurred areas introduces considerable OCR errors that compromise information retrieval systems. We propose a comprehensive approach combining advanced table and non-table detection techniques with probability-based post-processing heuristics to enhance recognition accuracy. Our method first applies detection algorithms to improve input data quality, then employs probabilistic error correction on OCR output. Experimental results indicate a substantial improvement, with recognition accuracy increasing from 72.86% to 79.26%. This work contributes valuable resources for Bahnar language preservation and provides a framework applicable to other minority language digitization efforts.