Equal CER, Unequal Damage: Severity-Weighted Character Error Rate for OCR
Character Error Rate (CER), the standard metric for OCR and vision-language models (VLMs), charges a typo as much as a wrong name.

ProofPaper ↗
Key points
- We introduce semCER, which keeps CER's alignment and denominator and charges each grapheme edit a severity from an LLM judge, with no word segmentation.
- Normalized CER keeps the score of a whole transcription, where it tracks readers as well as semCER or better, and semCER breaks that score down into named edits.
- On pairs drawn where CER and semCER disagreed, readers side with semCER more often than with normalized CER in English and Chinese, and equally often in Vietnamese.
- Across 16 languages, the judge charges a wrong diacritic or tone mark almost nothing in Spanish but nearly a wrong letter's severity in Telugu.
Sources (2)
- [1]Equal CER, Unequal Damage: Severity-Weighted Character Error Rate for OCRarXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 14, 04:44 PM
Character Error Rate (CER), the standard metric for OCR and vision-language models (VLMs), charges a typo as much as a wrong name.
We introduce semCER, which keeps CER's alignment and denominator and charges each grapheme edit a severity from an LLM judge, with no word segmentation.
- [2]Equal CER, Unequal Damage: Severity-Weighted Character Error Rate for OCRHugging Face Daily Papers · Oct 14, 12:00 AM · same content
Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.
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