Table of Links Abstract and 1. Introduction Abstract and 1. Introduction 1.1 Printing Press in Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan 1.1 Printing Press in Iraq and Iraqi Kurdistan 1.2 Challenges in Historical Documents 1.2 Challenges in Historical Documents 1.3 Kurdish Language 1.3 Kurdish Language Related work and 2.1 Arabic/Persian
2.2 Chinese/Japanese and 2.3 Coptic
2.4 Greek
2.5 Latin
2.6 Tamizhi


Method and 3.1 Data Collection
3.2 Data Preparation and 3.3 Preprocessing
3.4 Environment Setup, 3.5 Dataset Preparation, and 3.6 Evaluation


Experiments, Results, and Discussion and 4.1 Processed Data
4.2 Dataset and 4.3 Experiments
4.4 Results and Evaluation
4.5 Discussion


Conclusion
5.1 Challenges and Limitations
Online Resources, Acknowledgments, and References Related work and 2.1 Arabic/Persian
2.2 Chinese/Japanese and 2.3 Coptic
2.4 Greek
2.5 Latin
2.6 Tamizhi Related work and 2.1 Arabic/Persian Related work and 2.1 Arabic/Persian 2.2 Chinese/Japanese and 2.3 Coptic 2.2 Chinese/Japanese and 2.3 Coptic 2.4 Greek 2.4 Greek 2.5 Latin 2.5 Latin 2.6 Tamizhi 2.6 Tamizhi Method and 3.1 Data Collection
3.2 Data Preparation and 3.3 Preprocessing
3.4 Environment Setup, 3.5 Dataset Preparation, and 3.6 Evaluation Method and 3.1 Data Collection Method and 3.1 Data Collection 3.2 Data Preparation and 3.3 Preprocessing 3.2 Data Preparation and 3.3 Preprocessing 3.4 Environment Setup, 3.5 Dataset Preparation, and 3.6 Evaluation 3.4 Environment Setup, 3.5 Dataset Preparation, and 3.6 Evaluation Experiments, Results, and Discussion and 4.1 Processed Data
4.2 Dataset and 4.3 Experiments
4.4 Results and Evaluation
4.5 Discussion Experiments, Results, and Discussion and 4.1 Processed Data Experiments, Results, and Discussion and 4.1 Processed Data 4.2 Dataset and 4.3 Experiments 4.2 Dataset and 4.3 Experiments 4.4 Results and Evaluation 4.4 Results and Evaluation 4.5 Discussion 4.5 Discussion Conclusion
5.1 Challenges and Limitations
Online Resources, Acknowledgments, and References Conclusion Conclusion 5.1 Challenges and Limitations 5.1 Challenges and Limitations Online Resources, Acknowledgments, and References Online Resources, Acknowledgments, and References 5.1 Challenges and Limitations Following is the list of main challenges and limitations we faced during this research: • The limited availability of resources posed significant challenges during our data collection process. Converting the collected data into a digital format proved an additional obstacle. Manual transcription of the documents was difficult due to unclear text, non-standard spacing, and unique vocabulary influenced by Arabic letters and terminologies. We attempted to create the dataset synthetically, crafting a small tool that assembled letters from a given collection of character images. Regrettably, the outcomes were unsatisfactory, and given our time constraints, we discontinued this approach. • The non-standard spacing between the words and characters was challenging for transcribing the documents and needed to be more apparent for the model. The model interpreted the excessive gaps between characters or words as space characters. In contrast, in other cases where there should have been a space character, the minimal spacing went unnoticed by the model. • Extracting text from multi-column pages was another limitation of the model. • Recognizing mathematical equations was another limitation of our model. Considering the challenges and limitations and based on the discussion on the results, we are interested in exploring several areas in the future as follows: • Expanding the dataset is an aspect that requires further attention and effort. • An observed issue pertained to the misalignment of spaces between words and characters. To address this, a post-processing phase is suggested for rectifying the misaligned space characters. • Ocr’ing the multi-column pages property is another area requiring more effort. • Extracting mathematical equations accurately. Online Resources The dataset is partially publicly available for non-commercial use under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license at https://github.com/KurdishBLARK/OCR4OldTextsInSorani. Acknowledgments We would like to extend our gratitude to the Zheen Center for Documentation and Research in Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan Region, Iraq for their generous support in providing us with digital copies of certain historical publications. References Ahmadi, S., Hassani, H., and Jaff, D. Q. (2022). Leveraging multilingual news websites for building a Kurdish parallel corpus. Transactions on Asian and Low-Resource Language Information Processing, 21(5):1–11. Antonacopoulos, A., Karatzas, D., Krawczyk, H., and Wiszniewski, B. (2004). 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In 2015 13th International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR), pages 1121–1125. IEEE. Authors:
(1) Blnd Yaseen, University of Kurdistan Howler, Kurdistan Region - Iraq (blnd.yaseen@ukh.edu.krd);
(2) Hossein Hassani University of Kurdistan Howler Kurdistan Region - Iraq (hosseinh@ukh.edu.krd). Authors: Authors: (1) Blnd Yaseen, University of Kurdistan Howler, Kurdistan Region - Iraq (blnd.yaseen@ukh.edu.krd); (2) Hossein Hassani University of Kurdistan Howler Kurdistan Region - Iraq (hosseinh@ukh.edu.krd). This paper is available on arxiv under ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL-NODERIVS 4.0 INTERNATIONAL license. This paper is available on arxiv under ATTRIBUTION-NONCOMMERCIAL-NODERIVS 4.0 INTERNATIONAL license. available on arxiv available on arxiv

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