Solutions for more efficient and effective optical character recognition with respect to an input text segment are disclosed. In one example, a method includes processing an input text image using a deep character overlap detection machine learning model in order to generate a character map for the input text image, an overlap map for the input text image, and an affinity map for the input text image; generating an overlap-aware word boundary recognition output based at least in part on the character map, the overlap map, and the affinity map, wherein the overlap-aware word boundary recognition output describes one or more inferred word regions of the input text image; and performing one or more prediction-based actions based at least in part on the overlap-aware word boundary recognition output.