When Low CER is Not Enough: An Analysis of Hallucinations in Vision-Language OCR Systems on Historical Uruguayan Documents

Abstract

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is a key component in the digitization of historical archives. Recently, Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have emerged as strong alternatives to traditional OCR systems, achieving state-of-the-art performance on standard benchmarks. However, their suitability for archival transcription remains insufficiently understood. In this work, we benchmark traditional OCR systems and VLM-based approaches on the Berrutti dataset, a challenging collection of Uruguayan dictatorship-era documents derived from microfilm scans. While VLMs consistently outperform traditional methods in terms of Character Error Rate (CER) and Word Error Rate (WER), we show that these improvements hide a more complex picture. Through a detailed qualitative analysis, we uncover systematic failure modes that are invisible to standard metrics, including orthographic normalization, spurious content generation, and semantic substitutions that preserve fluency while altering meaning. Errors affecting named entities are particularly critical, as they can introduce substantial semantic distortions with minimal impact on CER and WER. These findings reveal a critical gap between quantitative OCR performance and transcription fidelity in real-world archival settings, and highlight the need for evaluation frameworks that go beyond character-level accuracy to capture the semantic reliability of generated transcriptions.