A spelling correction method and its application to an OCR system

摘要

This paper describes a method of spelling correction consisting of two steps: selection of candidate words, and approximate string matching between the input word and each candidate word. Each word is classified and multi-indexed according to combinations of a constant number of characters in the word. Candidate words are selected fast and accurately, regardless of error types, as long as the number of errors is below a threshold. We applied this method to the post-processing of a printed alphanumeric OCR on a personal computer, thus making our OCR more reliable and user-friendly.