Algorithms

Many months back, I started an experiment to see if Malayalam handwriting recognition can be done in a non-machine learning based approach. This blog post explains the approach, the work done so far and results. Handwriting recognition can be done while the user is writing(called online handwriting recognition) and recognizing a sample somebody wrote in the past(offline recognition). Online and offline recognition problems are different problems. This is because, in online recognition, it is possible to capture additional details such as pen up, pen down, pen movement directions and rotations. These details provide an extra advantage on recognition. In offline recognition, we only have a sample written by somebody in the past. It is also important to note that optical character recognition(OCR) for printed content on a paper has differences with handwriting recognition. Printed content often have regularities(single font, uniformly aligned content etc.) ...

At Wikimedia, I am currently working on ContentTranslation tool, a machine aided translation system to help translating articles from one language to another. The tool is deployed in several wikipedias now and people are creating new articles sucessfully. The ContentTranslation tool provides machine translation as one of the translation tool, so that editors can use it as an initial version to improve up on. We used Apertium as machine translation backend and planning to support more machine translation services soon. ...

A demo of cross language approximate search in Indic text: The Malayalam word സാമ്പാര്‍ is compared against a paragraph from http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sambar. In the bottom half, words marked in yellow color are search results. You can see that a Kannada word ಸಾಂಬಾರ್‍ is matched for Malayalam word. And that is why this is called cross-language. The inflections of the words സാമ്പാര്‍ – സാമ്പാറും, സാമ്പാറു etc are also found as results. This is the kind of search we need in Indic languages, not just the letter by letter comparison we do for English. ...