Cross-Lingual SynthDocs: A Large-Scale Synthetic Corpus for Any to Arabic OCR and Document Understanding
This addresses the problem of limited Arabic data for researchers and practitioners in multilingual document analysis, though it is incremental as it builds on existing synthetic data methods.
The paper tackled the scarcity of Arabic resources for OCR and document understanding by creating a large-scale synthetic corpus with over 2.5 million samples, and finetuning Qwen-2.5-VL on it yielded consistent improvements in metrics like WER, CER, TEDS, and CharTeX across benchmarks.
Cross-Lingual SynthDocs is a large-scale synthetic corpus designed to address the scarcity of Arabic resources for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Document Understanding (DU). The dataset comprises over 2.5 million of samples, including 1.5 million textual data, 270K fully annotated tables, and hundred thousands of real data based charts. Our pipeline leverages authentic scanned backgrounds, bilingual layouts, and diacritic aware fonts to capture the typographic and structural complexity of Arabic documents. In addition to text, the corpus includes variety of rendered styles for charts and tables. Finetuning Qwen-2.5-VL on SynthDocs yields consistent improvements in Word Error Rate (WER) and Character Error Rate (CER) in terms of OCR across multiple public Arabic benchmarks, Tree-Edit Distance Similarity (TEDS) and Chart Extraction Score (CharTeX) improved as well in other modalities. SynthDocs provides a scalable, visually realistic resource for advancing research in multilingual document analysis.