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The automatic recognition of hand-written text has been a goal for over thirty five years. The highly ambiguous nature of cursive writing (with high variability between not only different writers, but even between different samples from the same writer), means that systems based only on visual information are prone to errors. It is suggested that the application of linguistic knowledge to the recognition task may improve recognition accuracy. If a low-level (pattern recognition based) recogniser produces a candidate lattice (i.e. a directed graph giving a number of alternatives at each word position in a sentence), then linguistic knowledge can be used to find the 'best' path through the lattice. There are many forms of linguistic knowledge that may be used to this end. This thesis looks specifically at the use of collocation as a source of linguistic knowledge. Collocation describes the statistical tendency of certain words to co-occur in a language, within a defined range. It is suggested that this tendency may be exploited to aid automatic text recognition. The construction and use of a post-processing system incorporating collocational knowledge is described, as are a number of experiments designed to test the effectiveness of collocation as an aid to text recognition. The results of these experiments suggest that collocational statistics may be a useful form of knowledge for this application and that further research may produce a system of real practical use.

Titel: I’ve never seen anybody do the things you do befo[ɪ]: En studie om Cursive Singing. English title: I’ve never seen anybody do the things you do befo[ɪ]: A study about Cursive Singing. This is a critical study about the music industry with focus on the technological aspects of musical trends. The musical trend studied here is a modern singing technique called cursive singing – a phenomenon concerning the pronunciation of the lyrics in contemporary pop music. By looking into three hit songs of the late 2010s in which the singer employs cursive singing, I am aiming to find answers to two questions: Which other musical parameters do these three songs from 2015 to 2019 have in common, and what can they tell us about the mixing process? After answering this question, I am trying to find out whether certain contemporary music production techniques of these three songs could encourage cursive singing, and if so – how? I have employed two methods for analyzing the songs: a multimodal analysis as well as a reenactment of a recording situation. The multimodal analysis is based on the terms and concepts presented in the book Speech, Music, Sound (1999) by multimodalist and linguist Theo van Leeuwen, while the reenactment is an attempt to gain insight in the singing situation of todays recording artists, where the compressor is becoming more and more important in the mixing process, diminishing the dynamics of the recorded song. Through enabling mass production and distribution of music, the music technology has become an essential part of the music industry, while it at the same time is shaping the recorded music.

This research focused on the off-line cursive script recognition application. The problem is very large and difficult and there is much room for improvement in every aspect of the problem. Many different aspects of this problem were explored in pursuit of solutions to create a more practical and usable off-line cursive script recognizer than is currently available.

The intent of this thesis is to explore the current views and opinions that elementary school teachers, particularly Kindergarten through third grade teachers, have on the topic of handwriting instruction in their classrooms. Apart from the teachers, the views and opinions of selected Kindergarten through third grade students are also taken into consideration. Due to the advancement of technology and its prevalence in modern day classrooms, many consider handwriting, particularly cursive, a dying art, with keyboarding taking its place. However, research has proven that handwriting provides students with developmental benefits and helps to refine certain motor skills that keyboarding does not. To better understand the views of both teachers and students alike, the research design consists of teacher surveys and student focus groups to provide a better scope of understanding as to how teachers and students view this change in writing. The data is presented in the form of graphs and charts, which are then examined in detail.

Notre démarche repose sur le constat que de plus en plus d’enfants sont en difficulté d’écriture. Elle vise à proposer une base de réflexion sur laquelle pourrait s’appuyer un enseignement structuré de l’écriture. Notre recherche porte sur l’écriture des lettres minuscules cursives manuscrites latines en usage dans les écoles françaises. Nous avons fait l’hypothèse que cette écriture, produit de l’école française, constitue un système dont nous pouvons désigner les éléments et définir le fonctionnement. Cette hypothèse ouvre sur la perspective que la prise en compte de ce système pourrait être une aide à l’apprentissage de l’écriture. Notre choix est conforté par les résultats des neurosciences qui montrent qu’écrire à la main serait une aide à l’apprentissage de la lecture. A partir de l’analyse de commentaires sur la lisibilité d’un corpus d’écritures manuscrites, nous montrerons comment est construit ce système et quelles relations hiérarchiques et fonctionnelles ses éléments entretiennent entre eux. Nous y verrons que le cœur du système s’organiserait en deux unités minimales, déclinées chacune en une forme de base et deux dérivées pour l’une, trois dérivées pour l’autre. Le système constitué par l’ensemble de ces sept formes permettrait d’écrire toutes les lettres minuscules cursives latines en usage en France.En ouverture vers d’autres projets, nous avons mis ce système à l’épreuve de la reconnaissance des lettres par des enfants d’école maternelle. Nous avons constaté une amélioration du score entre avant et après une séance d’observation commentée collective. Cette recherche sur le système d’écriture des lettres minuscules cursives latines nous a conduite à avancer des propositions pédagogiques pour l’enseignement de l’écriture. / Our processes are based on the fact that more and more children have difficulties with handwriting. Its aim is to propose a basis for thought on which a structured teaching of handwriting could lean. Our research focuses on Latin handwritten cursive small letters used in French schools. We made the assumption that this writing - a French school product - constitutes a system, the elements of which can be named and the functioning described. This hypothesis leads to the viewpoint that to take this system into account could be a help in the teaching of writing. Our choice is backed up by the results of neurosciences which show that to write with the hand would be a help in learning to read. From the analysis of comments on the legibility of a corpus of handwritings, we shall show how this system is built and what hierarchic and functional relations its elements continuously use with each other. We shall see that the heart of the system would be organized into two minimal units. Each of them set up as a basic form and two derivatives for the one, three for the other. The system constituted by these seven forms would allow all of the Latin cursive small letters used in France to be written. As an opening towards others projects, we submitted this system to the recognition of letters by children at nursery school. We noticed an improvement of the score between before and after a session of collective commented observation of the letters. This research about Latin handwritten cursive small letters brought us to make certain pedagogical proposals for the training of teachers.

Cette recherche avait pour objectif de tracer le portrait des habiletés graphomotrices d’élèves de deuxième année du primaire fréquentant le milieu scolaire francophone québécois. Elle visait aussi à comparer l’évolution au cours de la deuxième année du primaire des habiletés graphomotrices, orthographiques et rédactionnelles des participants selon le style d’écriture appris et mobilisé (script ou cursif) et en fonction de différents niveaux graphomoteurs (fort et faible). Globalement, les résultats suggèrent que les élèves québécois de deuxième année, qu’ils écrivent en script ou en cursif depuis le début de leur scolarisation, ont une fluidité graphomotrice qui est comparable et qui se traduit par la production en moyenne d’environ 14 lettres lisibles par minute en début d’année et de 20 en fin d’année. Tant en script qu’en cursif, la vitesse d’écriture des élèves de deuxième année évolue positivement en cours d’année, mais ceux qui écrivent en script manifestent une progression de vitesse plus marquée. En revanche, concernant la lisibilité des lettres, les élèves qui écrivent en script atteignent un plateau en début d’année, alors qu’une amélioration s’observe entre le début et la fin de la deuxième année chez les élèves qui écrivent en cursif. La comparaison des performances et de l’évolution des habiletés orthographiques et rédactionnelles des élèves de deuxième année pointe des écarts importants pour les variables d’orthographe en copie différée, de longueur et de contenu des textes selon que les élèves présentent une bonne ou une faible fluidité graphomotrice, indépendamment du style d’écriture mobilisé (script ou cursif). Finalement, du point de vue de l’évolution des habiletés orthographiques et rédactionnelles, l'étude n’a pas permis d’identifier un avantage pour l’un ou l’autre des styles d’écriture, et ce, tant chez les élèves forts sur le plan graphomoteur que chez les élèves plus faibles.

Optical character recognition (OCR) software has advanced greatly in recent years. Machine-printed text can be scanned and converted to searchable text with word accuracy rates around 98%. Reasonably neat hand-printed text can be recognized with about 85% word accuracy. However, cursive handwriting still remains a challenge, with state-of-the-art performance still around 75%. Algorithms based on hidden Markov models have been only moderately successful, while recurrent neural networks have delivered the best results to date. This thesis explored the feasibility of using a special type of feedforward neural network to convert freeform cursive handwriting to searchable text. The hidden nodes in this network were grouped into clusters, with each cluster being trained to recognize a unique character bigram. The network was trained on writing samples that were pre-segmented and annotated. Post-processing was facilitated in part by using the network to identify overlapping bigrams that were then linked together to form words and sentences. With dictionary assisted post-processing, the network achieved word accuracy of 66.5% on a small, proprietary corpus. The contributions in this thesis are threefold: 1) the novel clustered architecture of the feed-forward neural network, 2) the development of an expanded set of observers combining image masks, modifiers, and feature characterizations, and 3) the use of overlapping bigrams as the textual working unit to assist in context analysis and reconstruction.

The thesis deals with current methods of cursive writing in the first grade of primary schools. The work consists of two parts, theoretical end empirical, supplemented with numerous charts and diagrams. The theoretical part of the thesis focuses on historical and contemporary writing methods (the classical method, the alternative method, Comenia Script font, the unbound font by Fraus publishing house, the print font of publishing house Nova škola, s.r.o. and the unbound font Alter Script by publishing house Alter) and on the concept of current writing exercise books. The latter part of the thesis analyses a survey conducted among teachers who gave their opinions on current writing exercise books for first grade pupils at primary schools and on alternative methods of writing. The thesis is accompanied with supplementary material.

陶淑慧. / "2011年8月". / "2011 nian 8 yue". / Thesis (M.F.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2011. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 46-50). / Abstract in Chinese and English. / Tao Shuhui. / 引言 --- p.1 / Chapter 第一章： --- 臨摹和創作的概念 / Chapter (一) --- 臨摹的概念 --- p.3 / Chapter (二) --- 臨摹的種類 --- p.3 / Chapter (三) --- 創作的概念 --- p.6 / Chapter (四) --- 創作的種類 --- p.6 / Chapter 第二章： --- 王鐸以前書家的臨摹 / Chapter (一) --- 王鐸以前書家的臨摹觀念 --- p.7 / Chapter (二) --- 王鐸以前書家的臨摹方法 --- p.8 / Chapter 第三章： --- 王鐸的草書臨摹 / Chapter (一) --- 王鐸的臨摹觀念 --- p.11 / Chapter (二) --- 王鐸草書的臨摹方法 --- p.13 / Chapter (三) --- 影響王鐸草書臨摹的因素 --- p.21 / Chapter (四) --- 王鐸的草書臨摹對其草書風格的影響 --- p.25 / Chapter 第四章： --- 王鐸習古對於當代書法學習的意義 / Chapter (一) --- 當代書壇習古反思 --- p.28 / Chapter (二) --- 王鐸習古對於筆者的啟示 --- p.29 / 結語 --- p.30 / 圖版目錄 --- p.31 / 參考書目 --- p.46