Handwriting has continued to persist as a means of communication and recording information in day-to-day life even with the introduction of new technologies. Given its ubiquity in human transactions, machine recognition of handwriting has practical significance, as in reading handwritten notes in a PDA, in postal addresses on envelopes, in amounts in bank checks, in handwritten fields in forms, etc. This overview describes the nature of handwritten language, how it is transduced into electronic data, and the basic concepts behind written language recognition algorithms. Both the online case (which pertains to the availability of trajectory data during writing) and the off-line case (which pertains to scanned images) are considered. Algorithms for preprocessing, character and word recognition, and performance with practical systems are indicated. Other fields of application, like signature verification, writer authentification, handwriting learning tools are also considered.

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Online and off-line handwriting recognition: a comprehensive survey

The proliferation of computing into the physical world promises more than the ubiquitous availability of computing infrastructure; it suggest new paradigms of interaction inspired by constant access to information and computational capabilities. For the past decade, application-driven research on abiquitous computing (ubicomp) has pushed three interaction themes:natural interfaces, context-aware applications,andautomated capture and access. To chart a course for future research in ubiquitous computing, we review the accomplishments of these efforts and point to remaining research challenges. Research in ubiquitious computing implicitly requires addressing some notion of scale, whether in the number and type of devices, the physical space of distributed computing, or the number of people using a system. We posit a new area of applications research, everyday computing, focussed on scaling interaction with respect to time. Just as pushing the availiability of computing away from the traditional desktop fundamentally changes the relationship between humans and computers, providing continuous interaction moves computing from a localized tool to a constant companion. Designing for continous interaction requires addressing interruption and reumption of intreaction, representing passages of time and providing associative storage models. Inherent in all of these interaction themes are difficult issues in the social implications of ubiquitous computing and the challenges of evaluating> ubiquitious computing research. Although cumulative experience points to lessons in privacy, security, visibility, and control, there are no simple guidelines for steering research efforts. Akin to any efforts involving new technologies, evaluation strategies form a spectrum from technology feasibility efforts to long-term use studies—but a user-centric perspective is always possible and necessary

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Charting past, present, and future research in ubiquitous computing

An intelligent automated assistant system engages with the user in an integrated, conversational manner using natural language dialog, and invokes external services when appropriate to obtain information or perform various actions. The system can be implemented using any of a number of different platforms, such as the web, email, smartphone, and the like, or any combination thereof. In one embodiment, the system is based on sets of interrelated domains and tasks, and employs additional functionally powered by external services with which the system can interact.

Intelligent Automated Assistant

Systems and methods are provided for receiving speech and non-speech communications of natural language questions and/or commands, transcribing the speech and non-speech communications to textual messages, and executing the questions and/or commands. The invention applies context, prior information, domain knowledge, and user specific profile data to achieve a natural environment for one or more users presenting questions or commands across multiple domains. The systems and methods creates, stores and uses extensive personal profile information for each user, thereby improving the reliability of determining the context of the speech and non-speech communications and presenting the expected results for a particular question or command.

Systems and methods for responding to natural language speech utterance

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Interacting with paper on the DigitalDesk

This patent describes a novel system, method, and program product that are used in interactive natural language dialog. One or more presentation managers operating on a computer system present information from the computer system to one or more users over network interface(s) and accept queries from the users using one or more known input/output modalities (e.g. Speech, typed in text, pointing devices, etc.). A natural language parser parses one or more natural language phrases received over one or more of the network interfaces by one or more of the presentation managers into one or more logical forms (parsed user input), each logical form having a grammatical and structural organization. A dialog manager module maintains and directs interactive sessions between each of the users and the computer system. The dialog manager receives logical forms from one or more of the presentation managers and sends these to a taxonomical mapping process which matches the items of interest to the user against the content organization in the content database to match business categories and sends modified logical forms back to the dialog manager.

System, method and program product for interactive natural dialog

This paper describes the evaluation of a natural language dialog based navigation system (HappyAssistant) that helps users access e-commerce sites to find relevant information about products and services. The prototype system leverages technologies in natural language processing and human computer interaction to create a faster and more intuitive way of interacting with websites, especially for the less experienced users. The result of a comparative study shows that users prefer the natural language enabled navigation two to one over the menu driven navigation. In addition, the study confirmed the efficiency of using natural language dialog in terms of the number of clicks and the amount of time required to obtain the relevant information. In the case study, comparing to the menu driven system, the average number of clicks used in the natural language system was reduced by 63.2% and the average time was reduced by 33.3%.

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Comparative evaluation of a natural language dialog based system and a menu driven system for information access: a case study

A method and apparatus are disclosed for ranking the results of a document search by identifying a prior, similar search and assigning a weight to each document based on whether the document was selected by a user of the prior search. The assigned weights are utilized to rank the documents identified by the document search in order of their relevance to the search terms. The search terms of the document search and information describing the selections made by a user of the document search are then stored to facilitate the assignment of weights to documents in future searches. According to another aspect of the invention, the weight assigned to a document is correlated to a degree of closeness of search terms of a prior search and search terms of a new document search. For example, a degree of closeness measurement is defined that correlates to a number of synonyms common between the search terms of a prior search and the search terms of a new document search.

System and method for user rank search

We-Met (Window 13nvirontnent-Meeting Enhancement Tools) is a prototype pen-based tool designed to support both the communication and information retrieval needs of stnall group meetings. The first part of this paper describes We-Met and the rationale for its design, the second discusses findings from an empirical study of the use of We-Met for group communication, ami the third discusses findings from a study of the search and retrieval of information from non-computer based meetings conducted to provide insight into how to facilitate these activities in We-Met. ‘Ile paper identifies potential comtnunication process gains due to the pen-based interface style, opportunities for the facilitation of information retrieval in a pen-based tool, and functionality/interface challenges in the design of a tool to support small group mwt i rigs.

Communication and information retrieval with a pen-based meeting support tool

A language recognition system, method and program product for recognizing language based input from computer users on a network of connected computers. Each computer includes at least one user based language model trained for a corresponding user for automatic speech recognition, handwriting recognition, machine translation, gesture recognition or other similar actions that require interpretation of user activities. Network computer users are clustered into classes of similar users according to user similarities such as, nationality, profession, sex, age, etc. User characteristics are collected by sensors and from databases and, then, distributed over the network during user activities. Language models with similarities among similar users on the network are identified. The language models include a language model domain, with similar language models being clustered according to their domains. Language models identified as similar are modified in response to user production activities. After modification of one language model, other identified similar language models are compared and adapted. Also, user data, including information about user activities and language model data, is transmitted over the network to other similar users. Language models are adapted only in response to similar user activities, when these activities are recorded and transmitted over the network. Language models are given a global context based on similar users that are connected together over the network.

Catherine G. Wolf

Papers

System, method and program product for interactive natural dialog

Comparative evaluation of a natural language dialog based system and a menu driven system for information access: a case study

System and method for user rank search

Communication and information retrieval with a pen-based meeting support tool

Language model adaptation via network of similar users