# A Unified Multilingual Handwriting Recognition System using multigrams sub-lexical units

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1808.09183 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.09183/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 Aug 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Automated pipeline for herbarium label digitization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.28676/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We address the design of a unified multilingual system for handwriting recognition. Most of multi- lingual systems rests on specialized models that are trained on a single language and one of them is selected at test time. While some recognition systems are based on a unified optical model, dealing with a unified language model remains a major issue, as traditional language models are generally trained on corpora composed of large word lexicons per language. Here, we bring a solution by con- sidering language models based on sub-lexical units, called multigrams. Dealing with multigrams strongly reduces the lexicon size and thus decreases the language model complexity. This makes pos- sible the design of an end-to-end unified multilingual recognition system where both a single optical model and a single language model are trained on all the languages. We discuss the impact of the language unification on each model and show that our system reaches state-of-the-art methods perfor- mance with a strong reduction of the complexity.