Online handwriting recognition based on bigram cooccurrence

We propose a handwriting recognition method that utilizes the n-gram statistics of the English language. It is based on the linguistic property that very few pairs of English words share exactly the same letter bigrams. This property is exploited to bring context to the recognition stage and to avoid segmentation. The recognition is based on detecting bigram cooccurrence. Even with naive features and a limited reference set, it recognizes over 45% of lexicon words that it has never seen before in a handwritten form.