System and method for retrieving electronic documents created by optical character recognition

摘要

A method, system and computer product for processing search requests in order to compensate for characters and character strings misread during OCR scanning is disclosed. After an alphanumeric search request is entered, the system determines variant words associated with the entered alphanumeric search request according to a predefined table of possible OCR errors, the OCR errors' probability of occurrence and a predefined threshold of probability of occurrences. When the preprocessing is complete, a search engine then uses the variant words to search a database containing OCR scanned documents.