Automated pipeline for herbarium label digitization

Digitized herbarium collections, now comprising over 100 million freely accessible specimen images, have become a critical resource for addressing fundamental questions in ecology and evolutionary biology. Yet the rich metadata encoded in herbarium labels (collector identities, geographic localities, collection dates, and ecological observations) remains largely inaccessible at scale, constraining both biodiversity informatics and the construction of specimen-specific image-text corpora for multimodal AI. We present HERBIOME, a modular end-to-end pipeline for automated herbarium label digitization, integrating YOLOv8-based component detection, CRAFT Hezar word-level text localization, fine-tuned TrOCR for recognition of mixed handwritten and printed text, and GPT-4o Mini for semantic metadata structuring into standardized fields. TrOCR was trained on a multi-source dataset combining general transcription corpora (CREMMA-AN, PictoCatalogs) with herbarium-specific data (RéColNat), achieving a Character Error Rate of 4.05-4.10%. End-to-end evaluation on 450 French herbarium specimens, using a dual-metric framework of Maximum Window Similarity (MWS: 0.614-0.618) and Semantic Metadata Accuracy (SMA: 0.440-0.445), reveals that hybrid training strategies improve semantic fidelity while random sampling maximizes surface similarity, with taxonomic fields remaining the principal bottleneck. By automating the extraction of structured metadata from complex, heterogeneous labels, HERBIOME reduces transcription burden, enables the construction of paired image-text datasets that faithfully capture specimen individuality, which is a prerequisite for next-generation multimodal biodiversity AI systems.

COCI: Conference Organisers and Content Identifier

Despite the critical role of grey literature in scholarly communication, artefacts such as Calls for Papers (CfPs) remain largely isolated from modern Scholarly Knowledge Graphs. The unstructured and highly heterogeneous nature of these documents has traditionally hindered their large-scale processing. In this demo paper, we present the Conference Organisers and Content Identifier (COCI), an AI-based framework designed to extract fine-grained, structured metadata from raw CfP texts. COCI employs a multi-stage pipeline that combines Large Language Models (LLMs) with semantic mapping techniques to integrate extracted entities with established knowledge bases, including OpenAlex, DBLP, TIB ConfIDent, and the AIDA Dashboard. By disambiguating authors and semantically aligning topics and conference series, COCI bridges the gap between informal scholarly dissemination and structured Semantic Web resources, laying the foundation for systematic analysis of non-publisher-based academic events.