grapheme-kit: Grapheme-Level Metrics and Text Processing for Multilingual NLP

Existing lexical distance, similarity, and evaluation metrics operate on Unicode code points, which can misrepresent errors in writing systems where a single grapheme is represented by multiple Unicode code points. We introduce grapheme-kit, an open-source Python library that extends these metrics to operate on grapheme clusters instead. The library also provides improved grapheme processing for Tamil and Sinhala, including accurate grapheme cluster identification and grapheme composition/decomposition utilities. Through an OCR case study, we demonstrate that grapheme-level metrics provide a more faithful evaluation of complex scripts.

GADS: A Super Lightweight Model for Head Pose Estimation

In human-computer interaction, head pose estimation profoundly influences application functionality. Although utilizing facial landmarks is valuable for this purpose, existing landmark-based methods prioritize precision over simplicity and model size, limiting their deployment on edge devices and in compute-poor environments. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{Grouped Attention Deep Sets (GADS)}, a novel architecture based on the Deep Set framework. By grouping landmarks into regions and employing small Deep Set layers, we reduce computational complexity. Our multihead attention mechanism extracts and combines inter-group information, resulting in a model that is $7.5\times$ smaller and executes $25\times$ faster than the current lightest state-of-the-art model. Notably, our method achieves an impressive reduction, being $4321\times$ smaller than the best-performing model. We introduce vanilla GADS and Hybrid-GADS (landmarks + RGB) and evaluate our models on three benchmark datasets -- AFLW2000, BIWI, and 300W-LP. We envision our architecture as a robust baseline for resource-constrained head pose estimation methods.