AI Prompt Engineering and Key Concepts in Machine Learning and NLP Practice Test 2026 - Free Practice Questions and Study Guide

Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, is the process of turning printed or handwritten text into machine-readable text. It analyzes images of text, recognizes the characters, and outputs editable, searchable text that computers can work with. This is how we digitize documents, enable full-text search in scanned archives, and feed text into NLP or data processing pipelines. Data refers to the information itself, data cleaning is about fixing errors in the data, and preprocessing involves preparing data for models (like improving image quality for recognition), but none of those by themselves convert images of text into actual characters the computer can use—that transcription is OCR.