Agapet13: A New Phase in HTR for Christian Arabic Manuscripts

Agapet13 (Transkribus Model ID 300833) is an advanced Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) model designed to transcribe Christian Arabic manuscripts, with a specific focus on the script used by the renowned 13th-century Melkite scribe, Poimen al-Sīqī. The model, developed to facilitate the study and accessibility of Christian Arabic textual heritage, is trained on a dataset of 307 pages comprising approximately 59,103 words. It currently achieves a Character Error Rate (CER) of 7.48%, making it a promising tool for scholars working on Arabic manuscript studies.