A study on effects of implicit and explicit language model information for DBLSTM-CTC based handwriting recognition

Deep Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (DBLSTM) with a Connectionist Temporal Classification (CTC) output layer has been established as one of the state-of-the-art solutions for handwriting recognition. It is well-known that the DBLSTM trained by using a CTC objective function will learn both local character image dependency for character modeling and long-range contextual dependency for implicit language modeling. In this paper, we study the effects of implicit and explicit language model information for DBLSTM-CTC based handwriting recognition by comparing the performance of using or without using an explicit language model in decoding. It is observed that even using one million lines of training sentences to train the DBLSTM, using an explicit language model is still helpful. To deal with such a large-scale training problem, a GPU-based training tool has been developed for CTC training of DBLSTM by using a mini-batch based epochwise Back Propagation Through Time (BPTT) algorithm.