Moby Dick meets GEOCR: lexical considerations in word recognition

The author has previously (Proc. Int. Conf. on Doc. Anal. and Recognition, Montreal, pp. 723-728, 1995) described a high-speed, lexically driven OCR called GEOCR (Good Enough Optical Character Recognition). This paper expands on that work by describing the effects of lexical content, structure and processing on the performance of GEOCR as a word recognition engine, describing the recognition of a particular text, Moby Dick. Word recognition performance is shown to be enhanced by the application of an appropriate lexicon. Recognition speed is essentially independent of the details of lexical content, provided that the intersection of the occurrences of words in the document and the lexicon is high. Word recognition accuracy is dependent on both the intersection and specificity of the lexicon.