Special issue on noisy text analytics

摘要

Noise is an unavoidable fact of life. It can manifest itself at the earliest stages of processing in the form of degraded inputs that our systems must be prepared to handle. People are adept when it comes to pattern recognition tasks involving typeset or handwritten documents or recorded speech, machines less-so. From the perspective of down-stream processes that take as their inputs the outputs of recognition systems, including document analysis and OCR, noise can be viewed as the errors made by earlier stages of processing, which are rarely perfect and sometimes quite brittle.