ResearchResearch paperEvaluation & Benchmarks · Multimodal Models · Computer Vision2 sources · Oct 14, 2026

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.

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)

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.

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