Previously we have introduced a neural predictive system for on-line and off-line word recognition (Garcia-Salicetti et al., 1995; 1996; 1997). Words are recognized thanks to a dictionary which is used in a postprocessing stage. We focus on this lexical part of the system and more precisely on the preselection technique that is used to reduce the computational complexity. We define and compare two edit distances and show how the results can be improved through the use of the confusion matrix.