tetrak/armenian-ocr-crops

Tetrak Armenian OCR crops

Training data for tetrak_hy, the Armenian text recogniser we are building as an EasyOCR custom model in tetrak-hy-trainer for Tetrak, an OCR pipeline for community archives.

The dataset has three configurations:

• corpus — 1,190 proofread pages of the Armenian Soviet Encyclopedia, as plain text with full Wikisource provenance.
• crops — the v0 synthetic pre-training set: 181,800 rendered word crops with transcriptions.
• crops-v1 — the v1 synthetic training set: 177,000 rendered line crops, degraded to look like scans. This is the set that trained the published v1 weights.

The corpus configuration

Plain text of proofread pages from the Armenian Soviet Encyclopedia (Հայկական սովետական հանրագիտարան, 1974–1987), harvested from Armenian Wikisource — volumes 1, 3, 4, 5 and 6 at the time of harvesting. Only pages proofread to Wikisource quality level 3 or above were taken.

Fields per page: volume, page_number, title (the Wikisource page title), pageid, revid (the exact revision harvested, so any page can be traced back to what Wikisource served at the time), quality (the Wikisource proofread level), index (the Wikisource index page the harvest walked) and text.

The crops configuration

The v0 synthetic pre-training set: 180,000 training and 1,800 validation greyscale word crops, each with its transcription (image and text columns, in train and validation splits). Words are sampled from the corpus above and rendered onto paper-like grounds, down to real scan sizes, in three faces: Noto Sans Armenian and Noto Serif Armenian (both under the SIL Open Font Licence 1.1) and Mshtakan, which ships with macOS.

The recipe lives in tetrak-hy-trainer (scripts/train_synthetic.py; v0 reproduces with --line-tokens-max 1 --no-augment --min-size 36), so this configuration can be regenerated from the corpus. We publish it so that published weights can be reproduced and audited without re-rendering.

The crops-v1 configuration

The set that trained the v1 weights: 175,500 training and 1,500 validation greyscale line crops, same columns and splits as crops. Three differences from v0, and they are the whole point of v1:

• Lines, not words. Each crop is 1 to 4 consecutive tokens taken from a corpus page, so the model sees spaces and line-shaped inputs rather than isolated words.
• Scan scale. Rendering sizes go down to 18 px, the x-height that real page renders actually produce, rather than stopping at 36 px.
• Degradations on both splits. A downscale cycle, blur, tone shift, small rotation and a JPEG round-trip are applied to the validation split as well as training. v0's crisp validation set read 99.7% while real scans read far worse; a validation set that never sees a degradation measures nothing useful.

The 60,000 line samples are split before rendering — every 40th sample is held out for validation and rendered once, the rest are rendered three times each with independent degradations, giving 175,500 and 1,500. Fonts are the same three as crops. The recipe is scripts/train_synthetic.py in tetrak-hy-trainer, which reproduces this configuration on its defaults.

Licences and attribution

We label the dataset as a whole cc-by-sa-4.0. Per configuration:

Configuration	Licence	Why
corpus	CC BY-SA 3.0	Verbatim text of the encyclopedia as hosted by Armenian Wikisource, which states CC BY-SA 3.0.
crops	CC BY-SA 4.0	The rendered crops contain the corpus text verbatim, so share-alike carries through; CC BY-SA 3.0 permits adaptations to be shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.
crops-v1	CC BY-SA 4.0	Same reasoning as crops — the same corpus text, rendered differently.

Please attribute the Armenian Soviet Encyclopedia and the Armenian Wikisource contributors who transcribed and proofread it. The fonts are used for rendering only; no font file is redistributed here.

Versioning

Dataset revisions that trained published weights are tagged. Pin a revision when downloading — with datasets:

from datasets import load_dataset

corpus = load_dataset("tetrak/armenian-ocr-crops", "corpus", revision="<tag or commit>")

Acknowledgements

The Armenian Soviet Encyclopedia was Daniel Ohanian's suggestion — when we asked on Mastodon for Armenian training material with trustworthy transcriptions, he pointed us at the proofread volumes on Armenian Wikisource. This dataset grew from that pointer. Thank you, Daniel.

Related

• tetrak-hy-trainer — the synthesis pipeline, trainer and packaging that consume this dataset (Apache 2.0).
• Tetrak — the OCR pipeline the trained model ships in.
• tetrak/easyocr-armenian — the model repository for the trained weights (Apache 2.0).