Abstract: In an exemplary embodiment, the invention comprises a principled edit-distance system that performs a method for determining the probability of character errors. In another exemplary embodiment, the invention comprises a post-OCR error correction system that performs a context-sensitive correction method. In another exemplary embodiment, the invention comprises a post-OCR error correction system that performs a comprehensive, unified correction process based on generalized edit distance analysis, wherein the objective is to find a corrected sentence that has the overall smallest edit distance across all levels. In another exemplary embodiment, the invention comprises a post-OCR error correction system that comprises one or more subjective fractional rank-based dictionaries. In another embodiment, the invention comprises a post-OCR error correction system that performs the automatic assignment of rank to words per-document dictionaries.