Optical character recognition (OCR) from newspaper page images is susceptible to noise due to degradation of old documents and variation in typesetting. In this report, we present a novel approach to OCR postcorrection. We cast error correction as a translation task, and fine-tune BART, a transformerbased sequence-to-sequence language model pretrained to denoise corrupted text. We are the first to use sentence-level transformer models for OCR post-correction, and our best model achieves a 29.4% improvement in character accuracy over the original noisy OCR text. Our results demonstrate the utility of pretrained language models for dealing with noisy text.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.