Towards collaborative agents for automatic on-line handwriting recognition

A important problem in many areas of complex information processing is to integrate heterogeneous information from different sources. For handwriting recognition we accomplished such an integration through an agent architecture of three co-operating agents. One agent represents the bottom-up knowledge as generated by a shape-based classifier of unistrokes. The second agent contains top-down (syntactic) knowledge about the language to be interpreted. The third agent is the user who produces written symbol shapes and who can be queried by the other agents. The chosen application paradigm is the real-time input and execution of Scheme code. Although this is not a practical domain, it contains all the essential elements of a full text-entry application. Notable improvements can be gained over a pure bottom-up approach to pen-based computing. 1