Fuzzy Full-Text Searches in OCR Databases

Though the quality of optical character recognition software is steadily improving, it is still far from being perfect. As a result, full-text databases that are lled by means of OCR software contain many errors. These errors have to be taken into consideration if such kind of databases are examined by means of full-text searches. In this chapter, we will illustrate some of the possible methods that { to a certain extent { cope with the uncertainty of the database entries. These methods add fuzziness to precisely formulated queries in order to increase their recall. In addition, the described methods are compared to the method of matching query terms exactly: the preliminary results of tests that show their eeects on recall and precision are given.