A linguist analyzes a large corpus of historical medical texts. Which failure mode most likely corrupts the accuracy of frequency-based analysis if OCR misinterprets similar-looking archaic characters?

💡 Explanation

OCR errors lead to incorrect identification of word tokens. Because the type-token ratio measures vocabulary richness, systematic misinterpretation of specific characters skews this ratio significantly; therefore, this ratio changes artificially, rather than syntax or semantic errors directly altering results.

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