Scene text spotting aims to detect and recognize text in real-world images, where instances are often short, fragmented, or visually ambiguous. Existing methods primarily rely on visual cues and implicitly capture local character dependencies, but they overlook the benefits of external linguistic knowledge. Prior attempts to integrate language models either adapt language modeling objectives without external knowledge or apply pretrained models that are misaligned with the word-level granularity of scene text. We propose TICLS, an end-to-end text spotter that explicitly incorporates external linguistic knowledge from a character-level pretrained language model. TICLS contains a pretrained linguistic decoder that fuses visual and linguistic features, enabling robust recognition of ambiguous or fragmented text. Experiments on ICDAR 2015, Total-Text, and CTW1500 demonstrate that TICLS achieves state-of-the-art performance, validating the effectiveness of PLM-guided linguistic integration for scene text spotting. The code is available at https://github.com/knowledge-computing/TiCLS.

Historical geologic maps contain rich geospatial information—such as rock units, faults, folds, and bedding planes—that is critical for assessing mineral resources essential to renewable energy, electric vehicles, and national security. However, digitizing maps remains a labor-intensive and time-consuming task. We present DIGMAPPER, a modular, scalable system developed in collaboration with the United States Geological Survey (USGS) to automate the digitization of geologic maps. DIGMAPPER features a fully dockerized, workflow-orchestrated architecture that integrates state-of-the-art deep learning models for map layout analysis, feature extraction, and georeferencing. To overcome challenges such as limited training data and complex visual content, our system employs innovative techniques, including in-context learning with large language models, synthetic data generation, and transformer-based models. Evaluations on over 100 annotated maps from the DARPA-USGS dataset demonstrate high accuracy across polygon, line, and point feature extraction, and reliable georeferencing performance. Deployed at USGS, DIGMAPPER significantly accelerates the creation of analysis-ready geospatial datasets, supporting national-scale critical mineral assessments and broader geoscientific applications.

Scanned historical maps in libraries and archives are valuable repositories of geographic data that often do not exist elsewhere. Despite the potential of machine learning tools like the Google Vision APIs for automatically transcribing text from these maps into machine-readable formats, they do not work well with large-sized images (e.g., high-resolution scanned documents), cannot infer the relation between the recognized text and other datasets, and are challenging to integrate with post-processing tools. This paper introduces the mapKurator system, an end-to-end system integrating machine learning models with a comprehensive data processing pipeline. mapKurator empowers automated extraction, post-processing, and linkage of text labels from large numbers of large-dimension historical map scans. The output data, comprising bounding polygons and recognized text, is in the standard GeoJSON format, making it easily modifiable within Geographic Information Systems (GIS). The proposed system allows users to quickly generate valuable data from large numbers of historical maps for in-depth analysis of the map content and, in turn, encourages map findability, accessibility, interoperability, and reusability (FAIR principles). We deployed the mapKurator system and enabled the processing of over 60,000 maps and over 100 million text/place names in the David Rumsey Historical Map collection. We also demonstrated a seamless integration of mapKurator with a collaborative web platform to enable accessing automated approaches for extracting and linking text labels from historical map scans and collective work to improve the results.