| The highly ambiguous nature of cursive writing, with high variability not only between different writers but also between different samples from the same writer, means that automatic recognition systems based on purely visual information are prone to errors. It is suggested that the application of linguistic knowledge to the recognition task may improve recognition accuracy. There are many forms of linguistic knowledge that may be used to this end. This paper looks specifically at the use of collocation as a source of linguistic knowledge. Collocation describes the statistical tendency of certain words to co-occur in a language, within a defined range. The construction and use of a post-processing system incorporating collocational knowledge is described, as are a number of experiments to test the effectiveness of collocation as an aid to text recognition. |
In: L.R.B. Schomaker and L.G. Vuurpijl (Eds.)
Proceedings of the Seventh International Workshop on Frontiers
in Handwriting Recognition, September 11-13 2000, Amsterdam,
Nijmegen: International Unipen Foundation,
ISBN 90-76942-01-3
pp. 475-480.