A New Linguistic Decoding Method for Online Handwritten Chinese Character Recognition

This paper presents a new linguistic decoding method for online handwritten Chinese character recognition. The method employs a hybrid language model which combines N-gram and linguistic rules by rule quantification technique. The linguistic decoding algorithm consists of three stages: word lattice construction, the optimal sentence hypothesis search and self-adaptive learning mechanism. The technique has been applied to palmtop computer's online handwritten Chinese character recognition. Samples containing millions of characters were used to test the linguistic decoder. In the open experiment, accuracy rate up to 92% is achieved, and the error rate is reduced by 68%.