Improvement of Context Dependent Modeling for Arabic Handwriting Recognition

This paper proposes the improvement of context dependent modeling for Arabic handwriting recognition. Since the number of parameters in context dependent models is huge, CART trees are used for state tying. This work is based on a new set of questions for the CART tree construction based on a "lossy mapping" categorization of the Arabic shapes. The used system is a combination of Hidden Markov Models and Recurrent Neural Networks using the hybrid approach. A comparison between a Neural network trained using the baseline labels and another one based on the CART tree labels is done. The experimental results show that the use of the CART labels for the Neural Network training beneficial. The lossy mapping based CART tree performed better than the baseline system. An absolute improvement of 2.9% in terms of Word Error Rate is performed on the test set of the Open Hart database.