Fast Search with Poor OCR

Abstract: The indexing and searching of historical documents have garnered attention in recent years due to massive digitization efforts of important collections worldwide. Pure textual search in these corpora is a problem since optical character recognition (OCR) is infamous for performing poorly on such historical material, which often suffer from poor preservation. We propose a novel text-based method for searching through noisy text. Our system represents words as vectors, projects queries and candidates obtained from the OCR into a common space, and ranks the candidates using a metric suited to nearest-neighbor search. We demonstrate the practicality of our method on typewritten German documents from the WWII era.