Towards the Natural Language Processing as Spelling Correction for Offline Handwritten Text Recognition Systems

[EN] The increasing portability of physical manuscripts to the digital environment makes it common for systems to offer automatic mechanisms for offline Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR). However, several scenarios and writing variations bring challenges in recognition accuracy, and, to minimize th...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Arthur Flor de Sousa Neto, Byron L. D. Bezerra, Toselli, Alejandro Héctor|||0000-0001-6955-9249
Formato: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2020
País:España
Recursos:Universitat Politècnica de València (UPV)
Repositorio:RiuNet. Repositorio Institucional de la Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:riunet.upv.es:10251/204390
Acesso em linha:https://riunet.upv.es/handle/10251/204390
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Deep learning
Offline handwritten text recognition
Natural language processing
Encoder decoder model
Spelling correction
Descrição
Resumo:[EN] The increasing portability of physical manuscripts to the digital environment makes it common for systems to offer automatic mechanisms for offline Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR). However, several scenarios and writing variations bring challenges in recognition accuracy, and, to minimize this problem, optical models can be used with language models to assist in decoding text. Thus, with the aim of improving results, dictionaries of characters and words are generated from the dataset and linguistic restrictions are created in the recognition process. In this way, this work proposes the use of spelling correction techniques for text post-processing to achieve better results and eliminate the linguistic dependence between the optical model and the decoding stage. In addition, an encoder-decoder neural network architecture in conjunction with a training methodology are developed and presented to achieve the goal of spelling correction. To demonstrate the effectiveness of this new approach, we conducted an experiment on five datasets of text lines, widely known in the field of HTR, three state-of-the-art Optical Models for text recognition and eight spelling correction techniques, among traditional statistics and current approaches of neural networks in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP). Finally, our proposed spelling correction model is analyzed statistically through HTR system metrics, reaching an average sentence correction of 54% higher than the state-of-the-art method of decoding in the tested datasets.