In this paper we present a novel approach to the automatic correction of OCR-induced orthographic errors in a given text. While current systems depend heavily on large training corpora or external information, such as domain-specific lexicons or confidence scores from the OCR process, our system only requires a small amount of (relatively) clean training data from a representative corpus to learn a character-based statistical language model using Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory Networks (biLSTMs). We demonstrate the versatility and adaptability of our system on different text corpora with varying degrees of textual noise, including a real-life OCR corpus in the medical domain.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) are increasingly available in modern health care institutions either through the direct creation of electronic documents in hospitals’ health information systems, or through the digitization of historical paper records. Each EHR creation method yields the need for sophisticated text reuse detection tools in order to prepare the EHR collections for efficient secondary use relying on Natural Language Processing methods. Herein, we address the detection of two types of text reuse in French EHRs: 1) the detection of updated versions of the same document and 2) the detection of document duplicates that still bear surface differences due to OCR or de-identification processing. We present a robust text reuse detection method to automatically identify redundant document pairs in two French EHR corpora that achieves an overall macro F-measure of 0.68 and 0.60, respectively and correctly identifies all redundant document pairs of interest.