Multi-Modal Semantic Parsing for the Interpretation of Tombstone Inscriptions

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Zhang, Xiao, Bos, Johan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Zhang, Xiao
Bos, Johan
author_facet Zhang, Xiao
Bos, Johan
contents Tombstones are historically and culturally rich artifacts, encapsulating individual lives, community memory, historical narratives and artistic expression. Yet, many tombstones today face significant preservation challenges, including physical erosion, vandalism, environmental degradation, and political shifts. In this paper, we introduce a novel multi-modal framework for tombstones digitization, aiming to improve the interpretation, organization and retrieval of tombstone content. Our approach leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to translate tombstone images into structured Tombstone Meaning Representations (TMRs), capturing both image and text information. To further enrich semantic parsing, we incorporate retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for integrate externally dependent elements such as toponyms, occupation codes, and ontological concepts. Compared to traditional OCR-based pipelines, our method improves parsing accuracy from an F1 score of 36.1 to 89.5. We additionally evaluate the model's robustness across diverse linguistic and cultural inscriptions, and simulate physical degradation through image fusion to assess performance under noisy or damaged conditions. Our work represents the first attempt to formalize tombstone understanding using large vision-language models, presenting implications for heritage preservation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_04377
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multi-Modal Semantic Parsing for the Interpretation of Tombstone Inscriptions
Zhang, Xiao
Bos, Johan
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Multimedia
Tombstones are historically and culturally rich artifacts, encapsulating individual lives, community memory, historical narratives and artistic expression. Yet, many tombstones today face significant preservation challenges, including physical erosion, vandalism, environmental degradation, and political shifts. In this paper, we introduce a novel multi-modal framework for tombstones digitization, aiming to improve the interpretation, organization and retrieval of tombstone content. Our approach leverages vision-language models (VLMs) to translate tombstone images into structured Tombstone Meaning Representations (TMRs), capturing both image and text information. To further enrich semantic parsing, we incorporate retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for integrate externally dependent elements such as toponyms, occupation codes, and ontological concepts. Compared to traditional OCR-based pipelines, our method improves parsing accuracy from an F1 score of 36.1 to 89.5. We additionally evaluate the model's robustness across diverse linguistic and cultural inscriptions, and simulate physical degradation through image fusion to assess performance under noisy or damaged conditions. Our work represents the first attempt to formalize tombstone understanding using large vision-language models, presenting implications for heritage preservation.
title Multi-Modal Semantic Parsing for the Interpretation of Tombstone Inscriptions
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Computation and Language
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.04377