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Recent years have seen the proposal of several different gradient-based optimization methods for training artificial neural networks. Traditional methods include steepest descent with momentum, newer methods are based on per-parameter learning rates and some approximate Newton-step updates. This work contains the result of several experiments comparing different optimization methods. The experiments were targeted at offline handwriting recognition using hierarchical subsampling networks with recurrent LSTM layers. We present an overview of the used optimization methods, the results that were achieved and a discussion of why the methods lead to different results.
Increasing robustness of handwriting recognition using character N-Gram decoding on large lexica
(2016)
Offline handwriting recognition systems often include a decoding step, that is retrieving the most likely character sequence from the underlying machine learning algorithm. Decoding is sensitive to ranges of weakly predicted characters, caused e.g. by obstructions in the scanned document. We present a new algorithm for robust decoding of handwriting recognizer outputs using character n-grams. Multidimensional hierarchical subsampling artificial neural networks with Long-Short-Term-Memory cells have been successfully applied to offline handwriting recognition. Output activations from such networks, trained with Connectionist Temporal Classification, can be decoded with several different algorithms in order to retrieve the most likely literal string that it represents. We present a new algorithm for decoding the network output while restricting the possible strings to a large lexicon. The index used for this work is an n-gram index with tri-grams used for experimental comparisons. N-grams are extracted from the network output using a backtracking algorithm and each n-gram assigned a mean probability. The decoding result is obtained by intersecting the n-gram hit lists while calculating the total probability for each matched lexicon entry. We conclude with an experimental comparison of different decoding algorithms on a large lexicon.