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LLMs solving problems OCR+NLP couldn't
11–18 of 18 posts
Re: LLMs solving problems OCR+NLP couldn't
#12Really looking for something we can run locally in terms of OCR LLM, I think a lot of people doing a lot of OCR and document extraction aren’t looking to upload every file into the cloud and the use is more narrow than typing into a chatbot.
While Gemini is nice, it would be nice to have a pipeline that works locally on a reasonably RAM’d unified memory Mac or Framework AMD board.
Re: LLMs solving problems OCR+NLP couldn't
#13OCRs don't hallucinate outputs = if it says "212.99mm" on architecture diagram it doesn't suddenly turn into "2413m" on the other end, because LLM thought this feels better. I remember reading on HN where that was happening in a such case (but sadly my google foo fails me to find a link)
Re: LLMs solving problems OCR+NLP couldn't
#14OCRs don't hallucinate outputs = if it says "212.99mm" on architecture diagram it doesn't suddenly turn into "2413m" on the other end, because LLM thought this feels better. I remember reading on HN where that was happening in a such case (but sadly my google foo fails me to find a link)
The case you might be thinking of is the JBIG2 implementation bug [1, 2] in Xerox photocopiers where the pattern-matching would incorrectly treat certain characters as interchangeable, leading to numbers getting rewritten in spreadsheets.
[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23588202
[2] https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0810_xerox_investigati...
Re: LLMs solving problems OCR+NLP couldn't
#15OCRs don't hallucinate outputs = if it says "212.99mm" on architecture diagram it doesn't suddenly turn into "2413m" on the other end, because LLM thought this feels better. I remember reading on HN where that was happening in a such case (but sadly my google foo fails me to find a link)
The case you might be thinking of is the JBIG2 implementation bug [1, 2] in Xerox photocopiers where the pattern-matching would incorrectly treat certain characters as interchangeable, leading to numbers getting rewritten in spreadsheets. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-23588202 [2] https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0810_xerox_investigati...
That's exactly it! Thank you!
Re: LLMs solving problems OCR+NLP couldn't
#16Are LLMs not NLP? They process natural language, no? And I assume the multimodal tools still use OCR for text extraction, or am I missing something? My understanding is that they're still doing OCR+NLP, just differently than traditional approaches.
1.) technically yes, most models used for that task are NLP but not LLMs in the modern sense though
2.) Actually they don't. Multimodal LLMs parse PDFs by taking multiple screenshots on each page.
Re: LLMs solving problems OCR+NLP couldn't
#17I don't mind people doing blog-posts advertising they're own companies - but I feel like i'd like a little bit more substance within this topic. It is interesting in a way, I find I turn to things like gemini 2.5 within simple OCR/NLP and now more substantial image editing than specific models. I think that's more because of the current state of the industry, a lot of those models are either internal, paywall locked…
cool thanks for that comment, I might update this in a couple weeks time since it seems to interest people but general feedback that it's too shallow.
Wanted to give some high level intuition I gained after working on document processing for a while now as many people are still surprised that e.g. layouts aren't a real problem anymore but will take the hint that hn is a crowd that wants more depth! :)
Re: LLMs solving problems OCR+NLP couldn't
#18I don't mind people doing blog-posts advertising they're own companies - but I feel like i'd like a little bit more substance within this topic. It is interesting in a way, I find I turn to things like gemini 2.5 within simple OCR/NLP and now more substantial image editing than specific models. I think that's more because of the current state of the industry, a lot of those models are either internal, paywall locked…
cool thanks for that comment, I might update this in a couple weeks time since it seems to interest people but general feedback that it's too shallow. Wanted to give some high level intuition I gained after working on document processing for a while now as many people are still surprised that e.g. layouts aren't a real problem anymore but will take the hint that hn is a crowd that wants more depth! :)
Yeah absolutley! Didn't mean for it to come across as snarky, more along the lines of I think this could be a really interesting subject to delve a little bit deeper on and would love to read that!