The Effects of OCR Error on the Extraction of Private Information

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Kazem Taghva, Russell Beckley, Jeffrey S. Coombs

Published: 2006, Last Modified: 15 Jan 2026Document Analysis Systems 2006EveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY-SA 4.0
Abstract: OCR error has been shown not to affect the average accuracy of text retrieval or text categorization.Recent studies however have indicated that information extraction is significantly degraded by OCR error. We experimented with information extraction software on two collections, one with OCR-ed documents and another with manually-corrected versions of the former. We discovered a significant reduction in accuracy on the OCR text versus the corrected text. The majority of errors were attributable to zoning problems rather than OCR classification errors.