Subject: Stroke Recognition (Pattern Recognition)

From: Nobody is allowed to log on to this machine <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 27 Apr 90 21:48:10 EDT

Different from pattern recognition, stroke recognition is very
easy for Chinese input.  There are many products, writing pads,
on the market.

Office Plus in New York City, the first distributor for BrushWriter,
developed its writing pad and tend to pursuade BrushWriter as the
standard input method.  I'm not sure about the current status.

Dr. Yan YongXin, the creater of Byx, once told me that one of his
friend wrote a compact and powerful driver (about tens of KB)
for writing pad input.  It was very fast too.

Stroke recognition may be good for well educated Chinese, who
learned the standard stroke sequences in elementary school.
But it's hard for others.

Yuan

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From: Scott Horne <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 90 17:57:48 EDT

Well, Yuan, even well-educated Chinese people don't all follow the same stroke
orders.  Compare the way most mainlanders write `xian1sheng' de `sheng1' to
the way most Taiwanese write it.  And how do you write `ao1' `concave' and
`tu1' `convex'?

                                        --Scott

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From: Ed Lai <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 90 17:18:26 -0700

A stroke order input method does not imply that a character must be written
in one and only one way, otherwise it would not be very useful. For one thing
it is possible to have multiple entries for the same character denoting the
different writing order. Of course this can quickly get out of hand,d then the
trick is, when the writing order is not exactly the same, how to get the still
be able to make an educated guess. BrushWriter is already doing that, Apple's
stroke input method is based on BrushWriter is even better, and I am quite
sure it can be further improved along the same line.

/* Disclaimer: All statments and opinions expressed are my own */
/* Edmund K. Lai                                               */
/* Apple Computer, MS77-E                                      */
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zW@h9cOi

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From: Scott Horne <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 90 23:33:10 EDT

I said that I don't care much about input methods because other features of
a word processor are more important to me.  Give me a big, expandable character
set containing both fan2ti3zi4 and jian3ti3zi4, and I'll be happy.  Give me
my favourite input method but a small character set or one with only fan2ti3zi4
(or only jian3ti3zi4), and I won't be.

Another good example of a character with various stroke orders is `tian2'
`field'.  In the mainland, it's  -  7  -  |  -   ; in Taiwan and Japan, it's
-  7  |  -  -    .

                                        Best,
                                        Scott

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From: Scott Horne <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 90 23:49:40 EDT

Sure, you could have a system with multiple stroke orders accepted.  But,
as you said, that can quickly get out of hand.  It's trivial to accept the
two usual stroke orders of `tian2' `field', but a system which attempts
to recognise just any old stroke order (and some people [especially those
from Hong Kong, I've noticed] use very strange stroke orders for certain
characters) will 1) be inefficient; and 2) make lots of mistakes.

                                        --Scott

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From: "J.B. WANG" <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 30 Apr 90 20:40:00 EDT

Actually in stroke recognition the sequence of strokes can be come
non-crucial. In Mr. Wang, Yongmin's five-stroke input method, for instance,
the sequence is really not that important. A friend of mine at University
of Pittsburgh used a mouse to stroke over the pattern on the screen to
create an index dictionary for stroke input of Chinese; even in this fashion
it is possible to make sequence unimportant.

In fact it does not need good or advanced education to follow strokes correctly
since it is taught in elementary schools only. But it does need one to have
a good writing habit, and a fundamental understanding of essential strokes.
In ao1 and tu1, as Scott mentioned, it would not be difficult to stroke it
correctly if you know how to write kou3 (mouth), i.e., vertical down first,
horizontal left to right closepath last, and the rest in the middle.

Here I would like to brief a piece of news appeared on p21 of April 27,
1990 issue of World Journal, which reported that a mainland Chinese who
now has his bussiness in Silicon Valley, is trying to sell his Chinese
pattern recognition technology to Taiwan manufacturers. Reportedly,
a reported research result of China's Telecommication Ministry had a
pattern recognition scheme employing laser beaming using rotational momentum
of inertial and another crition to allow 100% of acurracy on recognizing
6000 Chinese characters. A research result of Harbin Polytech showed
98% accuracy in speech recognition. It also hinted that research in such
aspects in mainland China lead Taiwan ('s technology) a great deal, which
is not a supprise to us.

In USA and Europe, I think we should take advantage of the advance and heat
of desktop publishing and TeX/LaTeX, as well as the success of Adobe PostScript
in standardizing output description. No matter how cheap the labor in mainland
China is, a laser printer will still remain a luxury. To be more accurate,
if we concentrate on Chinese text formatting and natural keyboard inputting,
the only ones who have conditions to compete with us are Singapore scholars
and commercial circles in the west.

JB Wang