Effect of recognition errors on information retrieval performance

This work shows experiments on the retrieval of handwritten documents. The performance of the same state-of-the-art information retrieval system is compared when dealing with manual (no errors) and automatic (word error rate around 50%) transcriptions of the same handwritten texts. The results show that, in terms of the user effort required to find the desired items, the performance degradation due to the recognition errors can be considered acceptable.