Microsoft Technology Licensing, LLC

Patrick M Haluptzok

Gregory Nicholas Hullender

Bodin Dresevic

Rudolph Balaz

Donald D Karlov

Subha Bhattacharyay

John R Bennett

Angshuman Guha

Robert L Chambers

Yutaka Suzue

Joshua Clow

Mukundan Bhoovaraghavan

Ranjit Kumar Gupta

Vamshidhar G Reddy

Anuradha N Padte

Ross Nathaniel Luengen

Michael David Revow

Meenaz Merchant

Benoit Jules Jurion

Richard Kane Sailor

James A Pittman

Shannon Westphal

W Earl Greathouse

Auxiliary content provided in addition to search results is selected and presented to aid the user in completing tasks and increasing user interaction performance. Auxiliary content is processed utilizing existing search engine categorization and identification mechanisms, thereby facilitating the determination of similarities between the auxiliary content and indexed content that is identified as being responsive to a search query. At least some of the search results identified as being responsive to the search query are compared to auxiliary content to identify similarities, including visual similarities. Similar auxiliary content are selected to aid the user in completing tasks, and such selected auxiliary content is provided with the search results, including in a visually distinct or separated manner.

Task-oriented presentation of auxiliary content to increase user interaction performance

An improved system and method for providing context information of executable code to an input method is provided. Advanced text input methods may be made aware of the type of text expected to be received as input so that input methods may achieve a higher accuracy in recognition of text input. Generic interfaces provide a framework for supporting application authoring platforms to allow application developers to easily specify context information to the system and have it reliably forwarded to the correct input methods. Additionally, a context tagging tool may associate specific text input fields of an existing application with an input scope without modifying the application itself. The context tagging tool may create a manifest that contains tags associating the specific text input fields with an input scope. Any advanced input methods use by the application may be updated with instructions for accessing the context information stored in the manifest.

System and method for providing context to an input method

The present invention relates to storing electronic ink. Ink is stored in a data structure that permits later retrieval by applications. The ink includes stroke information and property information. Properties may be associated globally with the ink strokes and/or with each stroke individually. The disclosed embodiments include a data structure that supports ink for multiple applications. Using the disclosed storage system, method, and data structure, various applications may expand on ink to include additional attributes while permitting the ink to be used in applications not supporting the additional attributes. When encountering an unknown tag, the applications will skip past the end of the tag and its associated data to start reading the next tag.

Serial storage of ink and its properties

An improved method and mechanism for recognizing chirographs (handwritten characters) input into a computer system. A primary recognizer is provided for converting chirographs to code points, and secondary recognizers such as binary CART trees are developed and trained to differentiate chirographs which produce certain code points at the primary recognizer. Each such secondary recognizer is associated with each selected code point. When a chirograph is received, the chirograph is provided to the primary recognizer whereby a code point corresponding thereto is received. If the code point corresponds to one of the secondary recognizers, the chirograph is passed to the secondary recognizer, and a code point is returned from the secondary recognizer. If not, the code point provided by the primary recognizer is returned. The invention sets forth an automated process for training the CART trees and for optimizing the recognition mechanism by discarding CART trees which do not improve on the recognition accuracy of the primary recognizer.

Method and mechanism to reduce handwriting recognizer errors using multiple decision trees

An improved system and method for personalizing recognition of an input method is provided. A trainable handwriting recognizer may be personalized by using ink written by the user and text authored by the user. The system includes a personalization service engine and a framework with interfaces for collecting, storing, and accessing user ink and authored information for training recognizers. The trainers of the system may include a text trainer for augmenting a recognizer's dictionary using text content and a shape trainer for tuning generic recognizer components using ink data supplied by a user. The trainers may load multiple trainer clients, each capable of training one or more specific recognizers. Furthermore, a framework is provided for supporting pluggable trainers. Any trainable recognizer may be dynamically personalized using the harvested information authored by the user and ink written by the user.

System and method for personalization of handwriting recognition

System and method for providing context to an input method by tagging existing applications

Ink is stored in a data structure that permits later retrieval by applications. The ink includes stroke information and property information. Properties may be associated globally with the ink strokes and/or with each stroke individually. Aspects include a data structure that supports ink for multiple applications. Using the storage system, method, and data structure, various applications may expand on ink to include additional attributes while permitting the ink to be used in applications not supporting the additional attributes. When encountering an unknown tag, the applications will skip past the end of the tag and its associated data to start reading the next tag.

A method and mechanism for displaying partial results of full context handwriting recognition. As handwritten characters are entered into a system, a shape matcher associates the character with a plurality of alternate code points, with each alternate code point having probability information associated therewith. The alternate code points are placed at the end of a queue, and a cost is determined from each alternate code point to any immediately preceding alternate in the queue. The cost is based on the probability information of the alternates and a transition cost therebetween. Then, the lowest cost path back from each of the alternates at the end of the queue to an alternate at the beginning of the queue is determined. If each lowest cost path back converges to a common alternate in the queue, the common alternate and any previous alternates on the path back are recognized as the code points for each of the handwritten characters associated therewith. Because further context cannot affect change the value of these code points, the alternates corresponding to these code points are removed from the queue, and the code points appropriately displayed on a screen as recognized characters, to allow editing thereof. The ability to provide partial results with no loss of accuracy may be extended to include the case where the language model is an arbitrarily complex non-determinsitic state machine including the case where the state machine may be generated from a dictionary.

Method and mechanism for providing partial results in full context handwriting recognition

A method and system for recognizing user input information including cursive handwriting and spoken words. A time-delayed neural network having an improved architecture is trained at the word level with an improved method, which, along with preprocessing improvements, results in a recognizer with greater recognition accuracy. Preprocessing is performed on the input data and, for example, may include resampling the data with sample points based on the second derivative to focus the recognizer on areas of the input data where the slope change per time is greatest. The input data is segmented, featurized and fed to the time-delayed neural network which outputs a matrix of character scores per segment. The neural network architecture outputs a separate score for the start and the continuation of a character. A dynamic time warp (DTW) is run against dictionary words to find the most probable path through the output matrix for that word, and each word is assigned a score based on the least costly path that can be traversed through the output matrix. The word (or words) with the overall lowest score (or scores) are returned. A DTW is similarly used in training, whereby the sample ink only need be labeled at the word level.

Handwriting and speech recognizer using neural network with separate start and continuation output scores

Method and mechanism for providing partial results in full context

Method and mechanism to reduce handwriting recognizer errors using

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Redmond, WA, United States of America

Patrick M Haluptzok