Advancing Question Answering on Handwritten Documents: A State-of-the-Art Recognition-Based Model for HW-SQuAD

Abstract: Question-answering handwritten documents is a challenging task with numerous real-world applications. This paper proposes a novel recognition-based approach that improves upon the previous state-of-the-art on the HW-SQuAD and BenthamQA datasets. Our model incorporates transformer-based document retrieval and ensemble methods at the model level, achieving an Exact Match score of 82.02% and 69% in HW-SQuAD and BenthamQA datasets, respectively, surpassing the previous best recognition-based approach by 10.89% and 3%. We also enhance the document retrieval component, boosting the top-5 retrieval accuracy from 90% to 95.30%. Our results demonstrate the significance of our proposed approach in advancing question answering on handwritten documents. The code and trained models will be publicly available to facilitate future research in this critical area of natural language.