A Word Association Based Approach for Improving Retrieval Performance from Noisy OCRed Text
Anirban Chakraborty, Kripabandhu Ghosh, Utpal Roy · 2014
OCR errors hurt retrieval performance to a great extent. Research has been done on modelling and correction of OCR errors. However, most of the existing systems use language dependent resources or training texts for studying the nature of errors. Not much research has been reported on improving retrieval performance from erroneous text when no training data is available. We propose an algorithm of detecting OCR errors and improving retrieval performance from the erroneous corpus. We present two versions of the algorithm: one based on word cooccurrence and the other based on Pointwise Mutual Information. Our algorithm does not use any training data or any language specific resources like thesaurus. It also does not use any knowledge about the language except that the word delimiter is a blank space. We have tested our algorithm on erroneous Bangla FIRE collection and obtained significant improvements.